SG1 on the Discworld
by Aenea
Summary: SG1 gates through to the Discworld...and panic ensues in typical, Discworldian style
1. Default Chapter

The discworld sailed through space, a slab of rock perched upon the back of the four giant elephants who in turn strode ponderously, like a giant daisy chain, around the back of great A'tuin the turtle. The turle flew serenely through space as only a creature with a head the size of a moon can. The discworld was about as improbable a place as it was possible to imagine. The fact that it could exist at all was probably because it was founded on a space time flaw of biblical proportions, a place where the fundamental constraints imposed by the universe were eroded. It's very existence was constantly being questioned, even by it's own denizens.

Does the falling of a tree in the forest make a noise if there no one is there to hear it? Would the discworld exist if there were no one on board to conceive of it? 

Questions like that had entertained philosophers throughout the ages, and probably went a long way toward explaining why philosophers all seemed to give up bathing and then take to hanging around on the top of obscure mountains where their emaciated bodies gradually fail through a combination of malnutrition and exposure. Do they find answers? Do they find enlightenment? Does the question have any relevance to this story?

Probably not…

But if the discworld is improbable, what then do we make of the people who live there?

Let's take one. Let's take… That one!

Even on a place as obscurely improbable as the discworld, the genius of Leonard De Quirm took the whole concept of improbability to new levels. Ideas occurred to him with such frequency and his genius employed so randomly that it had finally forced the world to act against him lest he cause the downfall of whole civilisations. What price the liberty of one man when the lives and sanity of so many were at such risk?

The extent of the danger posed by Leonard De Quirm is perhaps best illustrated by considering the occasion when it occurred to him just how the underlying and fundamental nature of space and time might be described and manipulated.

The story began innocently enough. 

No… that is not true, there was nothing innocent about the way the story began at all…

*

Something that carried the appearance of a stone ring (but certainly wasn't since it was composed of exotic matter which as a negative energy density and a propensity for making physicists tear their hair out) rotated slowly within the confines of its stone shroud. The ring was about twenty centimetres thick and approximately five metres in diameter. If it was stone, it should have left a sizeable dent in the timber floor. It wasn't but then appearances can be deceiving.

If anyone measured the rocks density, they would have quickly realised that it should have left a sizeable dent in space-time, not just the floor. 

It did neither. That should have been a clue to the portentous nature of this new thing that had just been created on the discworld.

The ring stopped and a hieroglyph engraved chevron clicked into place at the periphery. The ring began moving again.

While the ring rotated slowly, to the accompaniment of a rumble like a grinding wheel lazily crushing cornhusks, the sound echoed throughout the otherwise expectantly silent room giving it a new and dangerous foreboding. The ring's rotation continued remorselessly until a sixth hieroglyphic from among those engraved into the circumference of the giant stony toroid, dropped into place, forming a pattern that ancient Egyptians might have recognised. The key mechanism surrounding the giant circular stone locked with a robust click. 

There was a pregnant pause. It endured just long enough to lend the kind of 'air of expectancy', that you would expect from any Creator who had a flair for the dramatic. 

Then…

A burst of cloud rocketed five metres into the room; swirled malignantly for a second before it retreated equally quickly to become a shimmering interface suspended inside the stone ring. It looked like the surface of a swimming pool, except it was vertical, and didn't slosh on the floor.

"It works," said Leonard De Quirm. His face developed a self-satisfied smirk. "My Hole-through-space-so people-can-travel-to-other-stars machine works."

A genius Leonard might be, but naming things was not among his many skills.

He clapped his hand together thoughtfully. 

"Lord Vetenari will be interested in seeing this," he added, which was a masterful piece of understatement.

Happily unaware of the chaos he had wrought, Leonard set off across a garden that B.S. Johnson had bequeathed to a previous Patrician of Anhk Morpork. It was just as well that B.S. Johnson died young, so that the discworld was protected from more of his monstrosities. It was such a pity that his death had to be accelerated through public necessity and the contribution of human intervention, but we won't dwell on that. As it was, his short life left a legacy of brilliantly conceived, but fatally flawed creations scattered throughout the Sto Plains and the other cities surrounding the greatest of all cities; Ankh Morpork.

Leonard De Quirm strode confidently across the garden; his path pointed more or less directly toward where Haverlock Vetenari was playing with his scruffy old dog.

The voice of the Patrician of Ankh Morpork, arguably the most powerful man on the entire world, carried across the garden to Leonard De Quirm. "Fetch Wuffles," he said. He threw the stick and then noticed Leonard's approach. "Is it ready yet?" he called.

Leonard could hardly wait to give him the news.

*

"It just appeared sir," Samantha Carter said, while craned her head around so she could look over her shoulder at General Hammond. Her short blonde hair was in disarray from the attention of fingers that she pushed through it frequently during the previous few minutes. She creased her even features into an earnest expression and tried to convey just the right impression of earnest competence with the touch of deference that a brilliant scientist needed to carry off in order to prevent lay-commanding officers from feeling intimidated.

The commanding officer of the Stargate operation descended from his command position and hovered behind her chair like a stocky vulture. General Hammond was average height and more than average girth. His uniform covered his barrel like body almost as though it was sown together around him instead of buttoned. It probably was. 

"We were making a routine search through that quadrant," Carter reported in that stilted way the characterised military speak, she tapped the computer screen with one badly manicured finger, "and there it was. A new stargate."

Hammond looked over her shoulder and grunted. The expression on the face of his billiard ball head turned serious. "We've never seen a stargate just appear before Doctor. Does this suggest that the Gou'ld are active in that region?"

Carter shook her head. "I don't know sir. I don't think any of us could answer that for you." Carter waved in the general direction of the other scientific staff who occupied the room. 

Until that point every eye in the room was trained on their conversation. After Carter's remark, all eyes swung away from them at remarkable speed and studiously struggled to find something else to do.

General Hammond looked around the room and all he saw was general confusion. It was a circus. It was a chaotic babble and froth of computer equipment and harried military personnel. It was his command. And all of them were studiously avoiding eye-contact. While he cast his eye over the technical support team beneath his command, all that sat between General Hammond and the plethora of electronic displays was the back of a lot of heads; no one seemed to be prepared to even risk a glance his way.

"We'll have to send an investigating team," he rumbled to no one in particular. "Is the rest of SG-1 available?"

"I believe so sir," Carter agreed amicably. Around the room there was a certain relaxing of posture, almost as though everyone was glad it was someone else who was gong to be given the task of finding out who was capable of putting a new stargate into the circuit. Because, let's face it, everyone in that room knew that the worthy people of the SGC had not a hope of being able to create a stargate themselves. It took real technology to do that and out there was someone who had just done it.

"Get Jack O'Neill off his butt and tell him to come and see me."

*

Lord Vetinari stood beside Leonard De Quirm. The Patrician's posture had much in common with a large skinny crane while he contemplated the circular construct that Leonard De Quirm had presented with such a flourish. Vetinari would have frowned - if there was anyone else in the room able to catch the non-verbal communication that it contained. It would be wasted on Leonard. He could analyse it and draw it with remarkable alacrity, but understand it…? No, not a hope. 

"I'm impressed," Vetenary said carefully, "but I find it hard to reconcile this machine with my request for a printing engine that can automatically decode encrypted text."

Vetenary had long since given up trying to keep Leonard focussed on one concept at a time. He brain made more leaps and changes in direction than pinball game.

"Oh sorry," Leonard apologised profusely. "I finished that earlier and forgot to tell you. It's over there by the aerating-milk-for-making-frothy-coffee machine." 

They both contemplated the coffee machine and woud have purred if they had more gene complexes in common with cats. A silent debate ensued. It was not as though another expresso wouldn't make their eyeballs float in their heads, (except that it probably would) oh no. It was just that lately Vetenary had taken to visiting Leonard much more frequently than had been his previous want, just for the coffee. 

To think that the expresso machine might have been lost to the world if the death sentence had been carried out on Leonard De Quirm. Lord Vetenary shook his head.

Leonard De Quirm pointed at the stargate. "This idea occurred to me while I was assembling the code engine. I just had to follow up on it."

Vetenary examined Leonard more closely and tried once again to understand the manner of the man's thinking. It was a wasted effort as usual. When inspiration was being handed out on the disc world, it all seemed to bottleneck in the head of Leonard De Quirm. Leonard could be dangerous if he ever turned his attention to human beings instead of natural science and mechanisms. 

Vetenary shook his head at that concept. If Leonard ever did turn to politics, then Lord Vetinari might have to reconsider his odd patronage.

Vetinari regarded the stargate again. "What use is it?"

"We could visit other stars, see other worlds, meet other people. The ideas and the culture we could exchange."

Lord Vetinari contemplated a host of other possibilities, ones that Leonard would not have understood if he tried for a million years. The possibilities were endless. Or rather they all had ends - violent messy ones.

He shuddered and wondered if perhaps the world might have gotten by without the expresso machine after all. 

*

At about the geometric centre of the disorganised shambles left in the SGC rec-room, Jack O'Neill picked three more letters from the box beside the scrabble board and placed them on the letter rack in front of him. The S was upside down. He tilted his head and then decided it made little difference if he left it that way. He could still tell that it was an S even if it was upside down. He thought that was pretty cool. He now had S, E, R, E, N, I, and Y. He had a look at the board. He frowned. The only opening where he could use all of those letters was a T. He shook his head, damn, still nothing that he could build on. Jack O'Neill had a face that might one day have resembled McGyver from that old eighty's TV show that no one would admit to watching, but that was years ago and time marches on. A lot of the marching had been over O'Neil's face and the craggy visage that was left behind after time's boots finished their work hovered between distinguished and disgruntled.

Opposite from O'Neill sat a large dark hued man named improbably Teal'c and he frowned with much more skill at his collection of seven letters. Teal'c was a huge dark man with a shaven head, a serious outlook and a Gou'ld embryo snuggled into his nervous system. The latter was a constant source of consternation to Teal'c. It greatly impeded his potential promotional prospects, but he was leaning to live with the thing. He didn't have much choice really. If they tried to remove the thing from his nervous system he would die. Stuff happens. The only outward signs of the infestation were the hole in his abdomen when the snake like head of the thing could occasionally come out to play. Oh and of course there was the subtle addition of the gold tattoo on his forehead that was used by the Gou'ld as his badge of identification. It said slave in giant hieroglyphics. The embossing on his forehead looked like the knot in the grain of a teak log whenever he frowned. That was a lot. He seemed to have just three expressions, confused frown, arched eyebrow questioningly and impassive guard face.

"I am still not convinced that "dweeb" is a legitimate word," Teal'c commented.

"Of course it is, scores me thirty three," O'Neill said hurriedly.

"Daniel Jackson," Teal'c called over his shoulder. 

Daniel Jackson looked up from the book that covered half of his face from view. He wore his curious face. Jackson was a nerdish sort of man. His hair was always coffuired and worn just slightly too long for his current military occupation. The glasses he wore gave him a bookish appearance that said a great deal of truth about him. He looked reproachfully at O'Neill over the book he was reading, and then shifted his glance to the other player. His eyes peered questioningly over his glasses at Teal'c. 

"You are an expert in human linguistics," Teal'c asked levelly. "The word "dweeb" is that…?"

"Of course it is Jackson," O'Neill interjected.

"Well, strictly speaking…" Jackson began.

"Shut up Jackson," O'Neill ordered. O'Neill was a Colonel and used to having his commands obeyed. Jackson was a civilian and was used to being able to argue with the checkout operator over the price of marked down goods whenever he felt like it. Words to that effect lined up on his tongue and prepared to march forth.

The PA scratched significantly. Conversation stopped. "SG1, please report to General Hammond," came the voice through the public address system.

"Oh, damn. Will they never leave us alone?" O'Neill asked rhetorically. He quickly gathered up his letters and tossed them back into the box before Teal'c folded the board and placed it on top of the scattered letters. He then lowered the lid carefully into place.

Jackson held the door. The three of them walked out of the rec room and hustled to their impromptu meeting. On the table beside the now closed scrabble box they had left behind a piece of paper. It had been ruled into columns. At the head of each column, a label had been scrawled. They read: 'Teal'c and O'Neill. Beneath a column of crossed out numbers were the totals; 234 and 145 respectively.

The book that had so engrossed Daniel Jackson's full attention fell from the table and landed on the floor so the cover was visible to the next observer. He had not placed it properly on the surface in his rush to leave with the rest of the team. The title was revealed; it was 'The adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, adapted from the screen by Alan Dean Forster.'


	2. Chapter 2

Though a huge coordinated man with flame hair, Captain Carrot Ironfounderson of the Ankh Morpork city watch radiated an air of competence. But not today. Today he was not having one of his better moments. He crouched behind the overturned cart that formed the ersatz watch command post for this latest hostage siege scenario. Strictly speaking he was In Charge and he was not happy with the way it was being conducted. He turned to Constable Visit-the-infidel-with-pamphlets-praising-our-lord.

"Visit," Carrot said. The rest of his name was too big a mouthful even for Carrot to bother trying to say it out loud. 

The constable turned from his rapt concentration on the building across the street from where they were encamped and for once didn't have a parable to explain what was happening - with religious overtones. He just stared at Carrot and waited to find out what his commanding officer wanted to say.

"So what happened then?" Carrot asked mildly.

This was his chance. They came along so infrequently. Few people encourage Visit to speak. He drew breath and prepared to deliver. Anything he said took on many of the aspects of a zealot's sermon and he had the words already mapped out in his head. The Omnian school of public speaking had a lot to answer for. Carrot steeled himself for the stilted delivery. 

"They dashed into that building and we heard a great deal of screaming, the sort of ruckus one would have expected in the temple when…"

"The Fool's guild," Carrot interrupted. "I heard that right then?" Even Carrot, good natured and unfailingly polite Carrot, interrupted the flow of Omnian religious quotations when Visit got into stride. Carrot hadn't always been like that, but lately he had discovered that there was only just so much time in the day and so much to do in a city where crime was not just rife or organised, it was Organised. "They went into the Fool's guild?" There was just the last hint of wonder in his voice. "The Assassin's guild I could have understood." The Assassin's guild was right next door to the Fool's guild, there had been one particularly nasty period in the recent city history when that proximity had been the cause of a great deal of confusion and trouble. "But what would have possessed them to go into the Fool's guild?"

"That's what Downspout said," Visit supplied. "And I think I have the answer. I have these pamphlets if the Captain would like to browse through them I'm sure…"

"Perhaps later Visit. In the meantime can you get Downspout to come and see me?"

The Omnian constable almost bowed and scuttled over to the building behind their overturned cart.

With visit out of the way Carrot turned to the brain's trust of his watch. 

Leaning against the cart beside Carrot was Sergeants Colon and Angua. Perhaps that should have been said brains and trust. Angua had brains and Fred Colon had… no perhaps that wasn't right either.

"Fred, I thought Nobby was with you on traffic patrol?" Carrot asked.

"Well he was going to be, but I was caught up with something, and Angua was working the vice squad and she needed back up. So Nobby obliged. You know how he is always ready to throw his lot in with his fellow officers."

Carrot knew just how Nobby was. Corporal Nobbs was one of life's born quartermasters, always prepared to volunteer to look after anything valuable. Nobby looked after the petty cash, because whenever you opened the petty cash tin, you could be sure that Nobby was minding it in his own pocket. 'Wouldn't want anyone to come along and steal something that was just left around in a jar,' he would say.

Angua looked over her shoulder at the door to the Fool's guild again. Things had been quiet in there for several minutes. That was never a good sign. She turned her attention back to the rest of the watch's senior officers. A crowd was developing, as there always seemed to be when things happened on the streets of Ankh Morpork. It was that kind of town. Always ready to provide an audience to any street theatre.

Many members of the public watched Angua instead of the siege at the Fool's Guild, because she was worthy of their attention. She normally had the whole Chicks in Chain-mail thing going, and it worked for her big time, but not this time. This time she was dressed more in the manner of…

"They should be back there by now," Carrot supplied.

The only other members of the watch involved in their little contretemps, Constable Dorfl and Sergeant Detritus had been sent off to guard the back entrance, so there was no chance that the subjects of the hostage drama had made their way out the back way. The sight of a troll armed with a siege engine and a golem armed with his own freedom were enough to stop anyone in their tracks.

"I would have said so too," Angua agreed. She would have nodded but that sort of thing brought with it a few risks, dressed as she was on this occasion. She was out of uniform, going undercover, so to speak. Perhaps that should have read under-covered. Her dress seemed to be short of both material and fasteners. A lot of their audience appreciated the view.

"We were doing the bag snatch sting," Angua explained to Carrot. "I've tried to explain to Nobby that the whole sting works better if I carry the bag, but Nobby insisted that was not the sort of thing that a lady should take the risk doing. He insisted on playing the lady role."

"That seems to be more than a passing phase of his," Carrot commented charitably. Nobby and dresses was becoming synonymous lately.

"It does appear to be a touch more serious than that," commented Angua vaguely.

"Wasn't Detritus with you?" Carrot asked her. This whole operation was starting to make his carefully planned roster look rather superfluous.

"He spotted Haematite doing some sort of deal in the alley over there," she pointed across the road. "He went to check it out. He was gone a while and Nobby turned up and…"

Carrot nodded knowingly.

Detritus was hell on the slab trade in town. It had been his great passion over the last few months, dealing his own form of justice to the dealers who were preying on the city's little pebbles.

Carrot nodded. He always encouraged community policing. "How is Haematite?" Carrot wondered idly.

"He'll recover," Colon answered. "A bit of grout and a bit of time and he might be walking and talking again by the end of the month."

Carrot nodded thoughtfully. Street justice was frowned upon. Justice is mine sayeth Lord Vetenary the Patrician of Ankh Morpork. Somehow Carrot doubted that Lord Vetenary would be too upset about Detritus providing rough justice to a slab dealer. "So what were these men doing?"

"We're not really sure," Angua frowned prettily. "We were over there," she pointed to the corner of the street, "and this cart came tearing around this corner. It was travelling way too fast and overturned. They were being followed by another cart; it stopped, barely before it ran into this other one. They took one look at the wreck and then just disappeared. That was immediately after Nobby came over to investigate. I was concentrating on the slab case and missed that bit."

Carrot nodded. He didn't recognise the cart. He was better with people.

Fred Colon almost spoke up at that point. If he had he would have said something about an issue that had been on his mind for a while now. 

As the head of the Ankh Morpork traffic division, the investigation of traffic accidents and supervision of the clean up came under Fred's jurisdiction. Even someone with the sort of limited imagination with which Fred Colon had been endowed would eventually begin to notice the increasing frequency of cart accidents in the vicinity of Angua's bag snatching sting.

Crouched down beside Carrot, he was acutely aware of how distracting a sight young Angua could be. Dressing in that dress(?) might just have been the final straw. 

The only thing that stopped Colon's mouth from uttering those traitorous words was the presence of Carrot. While Carrot was a competent officer, even if life's natural sergeant Colon said so, he did so have a blind spot where his girlfriend was concerned.

In Angua's defence the injury rate to women walking through the streets of Ankh Morpork had dropped significantly over the past few months. Replaced by injuries to cart drivers admittedly, but still a considerable improvement. The Seamstresses' Guild had been quite complimentary about the change in circumstances.

"One of them was carrying a silver sword," Angua offered and then shuddered, violently. Her clothing struggled for a moment to contain her anatomy and managed to do so at the last moment. The silver sword was significant. Werewolves' aversion to silver was legendary and justified. "I could smell it, even from way over there." She pointed to the alleyway where the confrontation with Haematite had occurred.

"They grabbed Nobby and backed straight into the Fools' guild," Visit concluded. He had just returned to the command cart after summonsing Downspout. The laborious progress of Constable Downspout from the roof of the building behind them continued while they spoke.

"Obviously thought he was an old lady," Angua added as an after thought. 

"Not locals then," Carrot concluded. "Locals would know better than to head for that building." He thought for a moment. "But they're not that badly informed either. If they knew to wave that silver sword at you." That was a pretty well formed conclusion as well. Wearing the outfit she had chosen for the sting Angua looked for all-the-world like the highest priced lady of negotiable virtue that the city might possess. The last thing a man would think upon seeing Angua in that guise was anything to do with werewolves. Someone knew who she was, obviously. Which was it, an ignorant local or a well-informed foreigner?

The grinding noise made by the passage of a moving gargoyle had almost reached sufficient volume to obliterate any attempt at conversation. All eyes turned to watch the approach of a specialised species of troll. 

"Oo on'ed oo ee ee?" Constable Downspout asked Carrot. The city's gargoyle population had been queuing up to join the City Watch over recent months. They had a lot to recommend them. They made a great surveillance team, and after his initial hesitations the head of the City Watch, Commander Vimes, had found them to be extremely useful. They were patient, rarely becoming bored with the more tedious surveillance activities and they watched the one spot continuously, and for that they were paid all the pigeons they could eat. 

There was an obvious down-side to their employment. It had made something on a mockery of the carrier pigeon message dispatch system that the watch used when the gargoyles first came on board, but that was a small price to pay. (Unless you were a pigeon of course). Their one draw back was their inability to move their lips. You had to develop an ear for their accent.

Carrot had about the best ear for accents in Ankh Morpork.

"Was there anything else going on when they came through here?"

"Ike ot?"

"It just seems strange," Carrot ruminated thoughtfully, "that they would grab Nobby and hide like that. It's not as though we were actively pursuing them or anything. This just seems rather panicky to me."

"Ey ust abbed im an an," Downspout said.

"Nothing unusual about them at all?" Carrot asked. He waited for a response.

The gargoyle shrugged. "ey ere ools."

"They'd have to be to capture Nobby. They should have known that would bring down the wrath of the Watch." Carrot frowned. Something wasn't right about this situation. "Did anyone get a good look at them?" He asked.

Most of the team shook their heads. Downspout shrugged.

"Nobby would have," suggested Fred Colon.

Carrot gave him a look.

Colon got defensive. "Well he would have."

Carrot blinked and turned away as though not believing they had just conducted that part of the conversation.

"Thanks Downspout," Carrot said. "Can you watch out for us when we make the play for the door? I think we might need a high sight line. Just to be on the safe side."

The gargoyle shrugged and lumbered painfully away. It climbed the wall of the building in a sort of stop-motion animation kind of way. Carrot watched the progress of the gargoyle intently until it settled itself into position atop the building.

"Alright," Carrot said decisively. "Let's go and prod some buttock."

*

Jack O'Neill sprawled in the last chair before the exit to the conference room cradling his silver and sandy haired head in his hands. The day's third coffee sat half consumed on the table beside his elbows. His booted feet sat on the desk and they waved back ward and forward in time with the cadence of his words.

"Let me see if I've got this straight," O'Neill said. General Hammond sat to one side of the huge back lit television screen they were using for the mission briefing. He nodded for O'Neill to continue. Samantha Carter was pointing at a star in the middle of a cluster of stars and she smiled encouragingly. The image on the screen might as well have been the night sky outside their secured compound for all it meant to O'Neill. "It just appeared. Right? There's how many combinations of gate addresses? Sixty million or something, and there's only a fraction of those addresses used right? So one appears all of a sudden, just like that. Bingo! The Gou'ld have created a new one. After being inactive for all this time, we get a sign that they're expanding again. And you want us to go through and find out what they're doing?"

"That is correct," General Hammond answered. He crossed his hand in front of him, neatly beside his half-consumed coffee.

"Am I the only one here who doesn't think that this situation looks just a bit strange," O'Neill continued. "I mean, people, what's going on here? These bastards have been capturing people since before Moses played full back for Jerusalem and then they implant them with these little parasites that eventually propagate their species and we want to send a tiny little team of four to say hello. Does any of this start to ring a bell with you people?"

He made a Ta dah gesture. 

He faced four blank faces.

"What's your point?" General Hammond finally asked when no one else seemed to want to take up the issue.

"Well, it just sounds kind of dangerous, that's all," O'Neill explained.

"Yes. It is."

"And some more people could get killed."

"Yes that is possible."

"And the stargate teams are always at the pointy end of these problems."

"That is true. For which you have everybody's thanks."

"But most of them have no idea we exist because the whole thing is classified and the population of the Earth has no idea of the constant threat it faces."

"True as well."

There was silence.

"Well," O'Neill said finally, he pulled his feet off the table and sat them back on the floor. "OK, so I've made my point now. You can continue the briefing. I won't interrupt again." And with that he lifted the cup off the saucer and drank the rest of his coffee.

"Thank you Colonel," General Hammond conceded, "Major," he gestured for Carter to continue.

"As Colonel O'Neill pointed out," Carter continued, "this is an unprecedented development in the stargate network and we need to be cautious in how we go about our next few moves. Seeing how this is so unexpected, we sent a probe through the new wormhole. We'll run the tape."

She picked the remote control off the table and zapped the television. Luckily the video player was close to the television and it caught the backscatter from the remote and interpreted that as a command to action. On the television screen a scene that had been recorded inside a large office or study replaced the star field. A few desks were arranged haphazardly around the floor. Each was covered with paper. The resolution of the video image was too poor to make out the content of the paper sheets. A few half-finished machines sat on desks and a few more of them were bunched up in the corner.

Nothing happened. The video image ran on. More of the same nothing continued to happen. With no coffee left to distract him, O'Neill started flicking balled up pieces of paper into the waste paper basket.

The probe rotated about its axis. There was a window to the outside world. O'Neill paid attention for a moment and then grew bored. It looked like a pleasant day, a few fluffy clouds and little else to mar the azure perfection of a spring day. It looked heaps better than being stuck here beneath hundreds of metres of solid rock in the Rocky Mountains and listening to this crap.

"The atmosphere is predominantly Nitrogen," Carter said, "with a combustible concentration of Oxygen, trace gases, Carbon Dioxide, helium, argon, krypton," Carter was talking into the lengthening silence. She wrapped up the briefing quickly, having realised that the audience hadn't gone with her on that last tangent. "It appears to be breathable," she explained. "The temperature was temperate, say Southern States spring. Humidity was low. Nice place to visit."

"The desks and chairs suggest human occupation," General Hammond said.

O'Neill bounced one of his paper balls off the back of Teal'c's head. The rebound missed the basket by several metres.

"The Goa'uld often get involved in human occupation," Daniel Jackson said evenly. "It's what they do, occupy humans. We are their preferred host after all."

Daniel's wife had been captured and infested with a Goa'uld parasite. It was the reason he had been dragged back into the stargate operation from another world. He was not military by background; he was an archaeologist, or more correctly an Egyptologist. It had been his translation of the hieroglyphics that had decrypted the stargate for modern human use. For that breakthrough he received few thanks. Typical of the military; do a good job and your reward was a harder job. It was all classified. The entire stargate teams existed in a state of virtual missing-person status.

"How long does that video record go on for?" O'Neill asked.

"An hour, then we pulled it back through."

"Why?"

"Because it couldn't open the door and we didn't want to open our discussions with who ever is on the other side of the gate by blowing one of it's doors off it's hinges."

"In other words the probe wasn't armed." It was the second bad pun that the team ignored. Things must have been serious. O'Neill exchanged a glance with Jackson.

"That's right," Carter said.

O'Neill pulled his feet off the desk and dropped his boots to the floor with a thump. "OK, when do we go?"

"Right away," General Hammond boomed.

"OK, let's go then." O'Neill was already on his feet. "Let's get at it people."


	3. Chapter 3

His excellency, the duke of Ankh, Commander Sir Samuel Vimes of the Ankh Morpork City watch looked across his desk at his second in charge. Between them, the load of unattended paper work marred part of his view, but even just the small part of Captain Carrot that was visible to Vimes, was a treat. Captain Carrot's hair was a mess. His face still carried smudges of custard and charcoal. A blob marred his right eyebrow and another one decorated the tip of his left ear. His breast-plate was not it's normal, gleaming, self. He had a splotch of water smeared yellow paint on his side and a 'kick me' sticker hanging off his back. The whole package was completed by the expression of woebegone contrition he wore upon his face.

Sergeant Angua sat beside Carrot, looking like a naughty schoolgirl caught out with her boyfriend. She was similarly dishevelled. Her normally immaculately groomed hair was a bird's nest of tangles and had been speckled with spatterings of blue and orange paint. She had managed to clean the soot and custard off her face with more success than Carrot, but someone had made a pretty substantial attempt to fill her decolletage with custard. Some of it still stained the 'neckline' (for want of a term to describe something that was closer to her belly button than her collar bones) of her dress. 

Vimes wasn't smiling. His long mournful face would look odd should he ever crack so much as a smile. With all those vertical lines it would look like a banana trying to squeeze through a picket fence while lying down. But on the inside…? That was another matter.

His finger tapped a single sheet of paper that sat upon his desk. 

The heading on top of the paper read 'Incident report.' The ink was only just recently dry. Carrot's signature was at the bottom. The words between the heading and the signature were the subject of the conversation.

"It does not do the reputation of the City watch a lot of good to be involved in incidents like this one," Vimes said levelly.

"No sir," said Carrot.

"The worst part is that they got away."

"That's true sir," said Carrot.

"It wasn't really our fault," Angua said unwisely.

Vimes looked her way. It was a look that made a werewolf quail.

"Yes," Vimes said. "You had both Detritus and Dorfl outside the back door." His voice sampled some irony, then developed a severe case of irony overload. If there was much more irony in his words they'd be too heavy to get up his throat and out past his teeth. "It was such a pity they came through the front door. Now who was guarding the front door?" he made a show of reading from the report. "Why it was Captain Carrot, Sergeant Angua, Seargent Colon, Constable Visit and Constable Downspout."

"We didn't know they were clowns," argued Angua and then shut up because she could see how stupid that sounded. It was for Fool's guild they had invaded after all.

"You never thought to ask Downspout whether the people who dashed into the Fool's guild might have been actual Fools."

"Well the idea sort of occurred, sir," admitted Carrot. "He said they were fools. It's just that we took a different interpretation. It did seem pretty foolish of them to take a watchman hostage, so when Downspout said they were fools, I just thought…"

Literal as always, thought Vimes. Carrot and the English language would always struggle to understand one another. For a smart lad he could be unbelievably dense.

Vimes shook his head. "Get your selves cleaned up," he told them, "and meet me at the Patrician palace. We have a genuine emergency to attend to, apparently. We have to prepare for the arrival of a coach load of diplomats."

After the door closed behind the bedraggled pair, Vimes placed his face in his hands and laughed so hard he thought he might wet himself.

*

The team making up SG-1 stepped through the newly commissioned star gate and then moved cautiously into the room, taking up defensive positions one at a time in a perfectly executed leapfrog manoeuvre. They were all dressed in camouflaged combat fatigues, they each wore helmets with built in infrared and light enhancing goggles. On their backs they wore packs stocked with a host of measuring equipment and camping gear. They were also issued with a sub-machine gun capable of 1000 rounds per minute, a wickedly sharp carbon fibre knife and several ammunition belts that wrapped around their waists and crossed their chests. Each of the team's members held their guns at the ready when they appeared through the stargate portal. O'Neill had even made sure they had the safeties switched off.

"We come in peace," O'Neill said to no one in particular, which is a pretty dumb thing to say when you are waving a semi-automatic pistol and wearing enough ammunition to sustain a small guerilla war, but that's just his style.

'I don't think there's any one here," Daniel Jackson said. He looked around with vague interest. The scene before them might as well have been a nineteenth century University Dean's office. As someone who spent a large portion of his adult life ensconced in academia, Jackson wasn't all that enthusiastic about yet another one of those offices. They were places where old grey haired men ripped your thesis apart and attacked your skills abilities and your adulthood. He shuddered in reaction to a memory he wasn't going to share.

"I concur," said Teal'c, who had never set foot in a University, let alone an office in the inner sanctum.

"Yeah OK, I can see that," agreed O'Neill. He pulled his combat helmet off and slung it from his belt. He pulled a baseball cap from his pocket and stuck it on his head backwards. He pushed his sunglasses onto the top of his head, over his cap. "Makes a change from primeval landscapes or desert sand, no two ways about it." That was the predominant scenery on the far side of the gate. 

Having made his fashion statement, O'Neill stepped further into the room. He fondled and looked at a few of the things he found scattered over the tables, the benches and also piled into the corners of the room. In some respects he is still waiting to grow up, having a lot in common with a six-year-old in a knick-knack shop whose parents struggle to listen to the store owner while trying to make sure that their progeny don't break, bounce or swallow any of the merchandice. "What is this place?" O'Neill said finally. He picked among the scattered drawings and then drew one from amongst some sort of half finished piece of machinery. He looked at it closely. It appeared to be an engineering drawing, with sections and enlarged views, finished with numbered parts and little manufacturing notations. He didn't recognise the language. "Sam. Can you make out what any of this stuff is?"

Samantha picked up another sheet of paper and glanced at it quickly. "I think so, yes sir." She turned it through ninety degrees and then ninety more. She tilted her head another forty five degrees and then back to vertical.

"What language is it in?" O'Neill directed the question at Daniel Jackson.

"English," Daniel answered. He handled one of the scraps of paper himself. His tone was less than certain.

"English?" asked O'Neill. He took another look. His head followed the same tilting pattern that Samantha Carter had made.

"Written backward," Daniel explained.

"O. K," said O'Neill very slowly. He put the piece of paper back on the desk and then patted it once as if to say nice doggie, just stay. "I guess that makes a real pleasant change from pictures and hieroglyphics." He turned to Samantha. "See if you can work out what this stuff says while we take a look around."

She nodded. "OK." She pulled a chair from beneath a table and began unpacking her gear. Within seconds the top of the table looked like someone had disembowelled a television set and then scattered the entrails across the table.

O'Neill had no idea how she managed to sort through all that crap and still get results out of it. Sometimes he thought that the answers she seemed to be able to sprout to his questions were just guesses and the rest of the paraphernalia was for show. He would be none the wiser if that were true.

He looked around the room and tried to decide which was the best direction for them to head.

The room had a single window that overlooked an ornamental garden. Something about the perspective of the garden didn't look right, but O'Neill couldn't place the problem his eyes were having with the scenery at that time. He had bigger problems to content with.

There was only the one door. He stepped up to it. The handle moved at his touch. It wasn't locked.

"We'll only be gone an hour or so," he told Carter. "If you don't hear from us in that time you know what to do."

Samantha Carter grunted something inarticulately and resumed plugging circuit boards and cables together. The rest of the team was already gone as far as she was concerned. She had more important things to do than worry about where the men in her team might be prowling.

The three men slipped through the door, one behind the other in a typical military leapfrog manoeuvre. The door shut behind them with a subdued click.

Immediately after the door shut, Carter heard a series of scrapes, bangs, pauses, curses and one singular twanging noise. She looked up inquiringly, wondering for a moment what the hell that had all been about.

For some reason, understood only by the narrative gods, but totally opaque to mere mortals, a panicked chicken burst through the door, flapped once, squawked and then raced out through the open window and into the garden.

Samantha Carter's eyes tracked it's progress. She blinked a few times and that seemed to bring her intelligence back from whatever strange dimension it had gone upon seeing the chicken.

"How come they get to have all the fun?" She asked the piece of paper she held in her hand. It didn't answer her question. It just posed a few of its own.

She studied a drawing of the human body executed in intricate detail.

*

"One thing has always worried me about stargate travel," Jack O'Neill told Daniel Jackson. 

Jackson, O'Neill and Teal'c walked between the haphazardly constructed buildings that seemed to lean on each other for support arrayed on either side of the street, and sometimes across it. The place was stark testimony to a lack of town planning and an architectural nightmare, or maybe it was a testimony to demonic town planning and an architect's nightmare. Jackson was unsure, but his mind was testing each theory.

"Only one thing?" Daniel asked. His tone was distracted and his attention was definitely somewhere else. His eyes tracked a tableau he had lit upon in the shadows between tow slightly skewed buildings. And it was a compelling sight; a glimpse of what he was convinced was a vampire just beginning to feed on a weakly struggling human victim. "No it couldn't be," he muttered to himself.

"Well more than one, naturally," O'Neill said in an equally vague tone. He saw the vampire as well and watched it closely when it raced away into the shadows. Being more inclined to believe his eyes than was Jackson, the presence of a vampire was cause to doubt their weaponry and the sense of this mission. "But one thing worries me more often than most of the other things that worry me."

Daniel puzzled that one through and then finally fell for the trap of asking. "What's that?" Instead of concentrating on O'Neill's very real concern, Jackson was thinking that his eyes must be paying tricks on his mind, or maybe he was losing the latter and he could look forward to a nice rest soon - in a room with soft walls while he sat inside it dressed in a jacket with really long sleeves.

O'Neill stopped in the middle of the road, turned suddenly to face Daniel Jackson. A horse drawn cart dodged him at the last moment. The driver let out a few colourful expletives and then was gone. A couple of errant cabbages fell to the road and bounced away. "How come everyone seems to speak English? I mean, the first time we came through the stargate, we took you along because we needed an Egyptologist and the people we came across couldn't speak English and you had to translate for us, right?"

"Right," Daniel was more interested in the steaming pile of organic fertiliser that the horse had decided use to decorate the road. O'Neill's feet were dangerously close to stepping in it. If he took one more backward pace…

O'Neill remained in the same place with his hands firmly wedged in his pockets. "But since then every one we come across can speak English."

Daniel looked at him with a question written all over his face. "Your point being?"

'Well…"

Daniel looked blank.

"OK…" O'Neill gestured for Daniel to take up the story.

Daniel still looked blank. "So what was it you wanted me to discuss."

O'Neill shook his head. "Nothing."

He turned and started walking across the road. One pace into his march he stopped. "Oh, sh…"

He was right.

*

The stargate SG-1 team continued their distracted march along the street. 

"It might be Tudor era London," Daniel Jackson suggested. "We would need a historian rather than an archaeologist to check this place out."

"Were the Goa'uld active on earth that recently?" O'Neill asked Teal'c.

"Not that I'm aware," the Jaffa answered.

"Societies' evolve," Daniel reminded O'Neill.

"In parallel like this?" O'Neill asked bemused.

O'Neill had given up trying to clean his boots and was reasonably confident that he had scraped all the manure from them. It was just that he could still smell it; that was all. He hoped it was a phantom odour, a memory of what he had endured, although he wasn't so sure. 

"I think that pile of rocks moved," Teal'c pointed toward a pile of rocks that someone had heaped reasonably neatly in a way that they almost filled an alley meandering between two building.

"What?" asked O'Neill.

"In there," Teal'c said, and pointed. His eyes tracked the pile of rocks in case they decided to move again.

"Is that relevant?" O'Neill asked.

"I don't know," the Jaffa said, "but I believe it should be investigated."

The three stargate officers backtracked along the road. They stopped and looked at the pile of rocks. They peered at it. Each of them touched it with their foot and then stepped back. Nothing happened.

O'Neill reached into the alley with the barrel of his semi-automatic and poked the pile of rocks a couple of time. Nothing happened. He poked again with the same result. He was losing interest fast.

"You're sure," he asked Teal'c. He had gone so far out through the other side of irony; he was bordering on sarcasm. "It moved?"

"I am certain Colonel O'Neill."

"Not doing it now." O'Neill peered closely at the pile of rocks. Once again, it repeated its lack of animation. O'Neill shook his head. "C'mon, we're wasting time."

They turned away and walked toward the bend in the road. "How is it that a city like this can evolve so close to the Tudor era on Earth that you can recognise it?" O'Neill said. "That's what I want to know? Propagation of Minoan culture, or extrapolation of ancient Egyptian I could understand. The Goa'uld took people from those eras, but this…" he finished with a gesture. Then he shrugged.

"I don't know," said Jackson.

"It's getting sosea watchman can't even go under the covers in dis town before people start poking him in a rocks," muttered Detritus the troll. He was disguised like a pile of rocks and staking out an alley that was reputedly used extensively in the slab trade. So far all he found was a lots of bemused expressions on the face of people walking past, and endured the occasional poke in the rocks from a toe or the occasional more-rigid object.

Daniel Jackson stopped in his tracks. He turned slowly. "Those rocks spoke," he said.

"It's just a pile of rocks," O'Neill said.

"Yeah but…"

"Rock's don't talk."

"Yeah but…"

"Well you can sit here and talk to them if you like…"

"Yeah but…"

"You coming?" A note of impatience had crept into his voice. "We need to find someone in authority."

O'Neill and Teal'c strode purposefully toward the next corner in the road. Daniel looked after them and then back along the road toward the entrance to the alley, indecisively. He shook his head and then continued trailing along behind O'Neill and Teal'c. All the way to the corner, Daniel was looking over his shoulder as though daring the rocks to speak again. He lingered at the bend, reluctant to make that last movement.

The stargate team rounded the corner and was gone from sight.

"Dat were close," said Detritus.

*

Samantha Carter pushed a strand of her hair behind her ear and looked at the data that she was being fed by her mess of instrumentation and from the spider-web of fibre-optic cabling. She pulled her radio from a pocket at the side of her trousers without taking her eyes off the instruments, as though she didn't trust them to read the same thing if she looked away and then back again.

"Colonel O'Neill," she called.

There was a few seconds of scratching static and then Jack's voice came through. "Here, Sam."

She pressed the transmit-button again. "I'm getting some bizarre readings on the fundamental constants of cosmology here."

There ensued one of those pauses while the other end of the conversation waits for the nonsense to make sense. It didn't happen. No subconscious programming could work its way through that lot. Which left O'Neill with plan B. "What does that mean in English?" He asked.

"We're obviously close to some sort of rift in space time," Samantha Carter transmitted.

Same pause, different time. "That was only marginally closer to English, Sam. How about we pretend - hypothetically you understand - that I don't have any idea what it is that you're talking about? Let's start from there."

Samantha took a deep breath. She was used to this sort of response for Jack. He was a great guy, and if they were thrown together without the military regulations regarding fraternisation they might have conducted a wholly different type of relationship, but there were times when she could beat his head with a blunt instrument. "Well the laws of physics don't seem to apply in quite the same way that I would normally expect them to. Things are not going to be quite the same as they are back home."

"OK. That sounds bad."

"It might be."

"Is that a doubt I hear?"

"Yeah, a bit. Look it's like this. Probability is all screwed up here. You might find improbable things happening."

This time there was a slightly different pause. It was the sort of pause you get where the other end of the conversation can't believe that they have been told something quite like what their ears insisted was just said. 

"You mean more improbable than the stargate and Goa'uld and Teal'c and some of the other stuff we've encountered?"

"Much more so," Carter said emphatically.

"OK, that goes beyond bad," O'Neill decided. "That gets nearer to scary."

Samantha Carter clamped her bottom lip between her teeth. "Um, there's something else," she said finally. "I've been looking through the notes that the inventor of the new stargate left behind, and I get the feeling that they believe the world is carried on the back of four elephants that ride on the back of a giant turtle swimming through space."

Silence answered.

"O'Neill?"

"Daniel here," said Daniel. "I know that legend. I think I can place that one when we get back to base. We're talking about an ancient culture here. Very primitive belief system."

Daniel left the transmit button of the radio pressed so Carter heard the discussion between the three male members of the team. 

"Daniel Jackson, I suggest that you remember that this ancient culture invented the stargate by themselves," Teal'c reminded Daniel.

"There is that I suppose,' said Daniel's voice.

"I wish you hadn't brought that up," O'Neill said.

*

O'Neill placed his radio back in the little pocket just above his left knee an re-fastened the fabric cover. 

"We probably should try to find whoever's in charge here," O'Neill told Teal'c and Jackson. His gaze tracked from building to building. If he did that for too long he would get a crick in his neck from all the little jerky movements required to follow the building line. "These buildings all look the same."

"Like they're about to fall over," Daniel Jackson offered sardonically.

"Or catch alight," O'Neill agreed.

"This place looks like it's been built on top of itself over and over again," Daniel said. Near the footpath on the opposite side of the road he was sure he could see the top of a door way, barely a couple of centimetres above the pavement line. It was being used as a doorstep now. "I don't know of any human culture that does that."

"Is that important?" O'Neill asked.

"It could be of great cultural significance."

"Whatever," said O'Neill. "Look, if we're going to find someone in charge here, we need to ask somebody. I think that's the only way we're going to find out where the guy in-charge hides out. We'll try in a pub." He looked around, then pointed along the street. "That one."

The sign above the door said "The Mended Drum."

They pushed their way inside.


	4. Chapter 4

Samatha Carter had been working studiously on her investigation into the nature of space around the discworld and had completely lost track of time. Things were far from right here. There was no reason why the universe should have different physical properties in one location when compared to another. It just wasn't right.

And worst of all she wasn't going to be able to write this up because no one outside of SGC was to know anything about the things she discovered. The scientific community, particularly the physically sciences had very few recognisable female champions, and here she was, at the front line of the most amazing research. and no chance of recognition.

She would have cursed.

But she had done that before and it got her nowhere. So she didn't bother this time, but it just wasn't fair.

The boys hadn't been in touch for a while, she realised, and thought they must have found something to keep them busy. They usually did. Knowing Jack, he had probably taken them into a pub somewhere and they were enjoying the spoils.

She rejoined her work and frowned.

*

Teal'c woke with a splitting headache and a bad case of full-bladder. He groaned and though seriously about going back to sleep, but it wasn't sleep he had been doing and slipping back into unconsciousness was probably a bad thing. Besides, there was the headache and the bladder problem to deal with. When he catalogued the extent of his headache he realised that it extended all the way down to his little toes. Even his little pinky finger hurt, like someone had stepped on it. He opened his eyes and… 

The sight that confronted him, very nearly cured the full-bladder problem. He closed his eyes quickly before he embarrassed himself any further. Thus he managed to avoid the cure for the bladder but the effort required made his first problem much worse. He groaned again but the loud noise made his head hurt even more.

He was lying in what looked like a medieval torture chamber complete with heavy metal mechanisms and other means of persuading people to confess to things that they might or might not have done.

But that was not the worst part. Oh no…

His mind raced along the line of what do I do now. There was only going forward…

He opened just his right eye the second time, hoping that he could dilute the problem if his brain only got the information from one source instead of two. Light stabbed into his head like a red-hot poker, but he stood up to the assault tis time. Then the volume got turned down after a while and he could see again.

No it wasn't any better the second time. It was still there. Teal'c found himself looking at something that seemed to have been stitched together from a butcher's shopwindow display. It was shaped like a human being (well, in a sort of lopsided way) although no attempt had been made at anything other than a loose approach to symmetry.

It moved. Teal'c groaned and closed his eye again.

"Hello," said Igor. His voice was dripping with enthusthiathm, among other liquids. "I wondered how long it would be before you woke up thir."

The fragmented apparition pushed itself off the bench and walked over to take a closer look at Teal'c. It's walk had more stagger than swagger. Teal'c tried not to watch but it was one of those sick fascination things where people watch those flaming wrecks at European Air shows.

"Where am I?" Teal'c managed to ask, only after carefully marshalling his resources, things like tongues and lips, all of which were reluctant to obey the call to duty. He finally bullied them into action. His tongue felt like it had died in his mouth and was already partially putrescent but it worked.

The meat-man sat back on the seat and crossed his legs. One foot was not lower than the other, so the legs were obviously different lengths. "In the thells of the thity watch houthe, thir," Igor answered. "I believe that you were arrethted for dithturbing the peathe."

Teal'c wiped his face and squirmed across the surface of the hard bunk, struggling to get as far away from the apparition as he could manage. His back reached the wall. He pushed further but, despite his best efforts, the wall wouldn't give way. Perhaps now he was outside of the fall out zone. If he wasn't there was nothing he could do about it. 

With the immediate concern of saliva fall-out attended to, Teal'c could get onto the next most pressing thing on his to-do list. He groaned. Memories returned. He had flashes of a fight and…

Then nothing.

"The people up thtairs found out that you were quite different to your friendth," the butchershop man continued. "Thergeant Angua can be quite pertheptive in that regard. Apparently you smell differently to them. They brought you down to thee me. I have been charged with informing them of what manner of man you are thir."

Teal'c was once a Jaffa, a slave of the evil Goa'uld (although that is not how they see themselves) and as such he has a Goa'uld larvae inside his body. It is symbiotically bound into his nervous system, taking nourishment, and not much else from him any more. A forest of micro-filaments interface the Goa'uld larvae with every function of his nervous system. Teal'c doesn't want it there, because the Goa'uld have a different view on self determination than the opinion held by their hosts, and Teal'c tries extremely hard to aid the medical staff supporting the SGC command in research into the manner of de-Goa'uld-ing Jaffas. 

As you could probably imagine, Teal'c and his symbiont do not get on at all well. You might even describe their relationship as dysfunctional. 

The goa'uld waits inside him and in that dull and dreary environment, it rages at it's own incarceration. We know all about their philosophy, they have published their manifesto in large deeds writ across the stargate network. They was born to rule, to make the decisions, to act like a god and generally make life miserable for those around them for their own ends… Needless to say the one that is lying captive within the confines of Teal'c's nervous system is not happy to be stuck inside a Jaffa who has control of his own body. The Goa'uld has gone quietly nuts in the sensory deprivation chamber that is the inside of Teal'c's body. Their disputes would make a story all by them selves.

One day human medical science (or blindly fumbling witch-doctor-y, depending on your viewpoint on these matters) is going to find a way to get the thing out from inside Teal'c. And Teal'c is going to party big time when it's gone.

Yep, he was different alright.

"And who are you?" Teal'c hazarded. His head felt slightly less awful, perhaps there was light at the end of the tunnel after all, so long as it wasn't an on-coming train.

"Why, I am an Igor, thir. Pleathed to make your aquaintanth," the meat man shot out his hand. For a worrying moment Teal'c thought that it might not stop when the arm did. The stitching gave a worrying stretch but the hand stayed anchored.

Teal'c wiped his face again. No, he had not moved far enough away. All he had left as protective options from the liquid fall-out was the possibility of asking questions without 's' in the answer. But his back was to the wall and the hand waited for him to take it. Teal'c reached for it, cautiously.

The Igor watched Teal'c carefully shaking his hand. Teal'c was worried that the hand would remain clasped between his own fingers when they finished their greeting. The patchwork hand withdrew. It remained attached to the arm. Teal'c breathed a sigh of relief.

"There'th thomething I've been dying to know," Igor asked. "That thing inthide your body. It hath the motht amathingly thmall thtiching. Could you tell me how was it done?"

*

Jack O'Neill awoke at almost the same time that Teal'c did and with the same combination of headache and bladder-full as Teal'c was experiencing. The only variation in the experience was the score of metres of elevation that separated O'Neill from Teal'c's version of the dungeon. It didn't help much. He appeared to be in a cell, complete with bars for one wall, rocks for walls and a tiny little window right up near the top of the wall opposite from where his crude bunk sat. Through a wonderful piece of ergonomic design, the tiny sliver of daylight admitted by the tiny window landed square on O'Neill's face.

And then mercifully it was gone, just when O'Neill was about to prove his acquaintance with profanity. The light was replaced by a shadow and the shadow contained a human being.

Overall O'Neill's waking experience was somewhat less stressful that Teal'c's but he was still going to be confronted by a questioner and he hated being interrogated with a hangover. It was like being in the middle of a two for the price of one sale. It was too late to go back to pretending to be unconscious. He was just going to have to face the music.

O'Neill struggled partially upright, leaning his weight on one elbow.

He found himself being examined by a large man whose earnest face watched him carefully from beneath his short-cropped red hair. The questioner wore a gleaming breast plate and chain mail. On his hip was the largest, most obviously used, sword O'Neill had ever seen in his life.

"Where am I?" O'Neill croaked. The effort use up all of his reserves and he collapsed back onto the bunk, eyes closed. His questioner dragged a stool across the floor, making a sound like being on stage at a Metallica concert after a night on the town with Motley Crue. He sat on it and regarded O'Neill gravely.

"Office of the city watch," the big red headed man answered. "I'm Captain Carrot Ironfounderson, for your information." Carrot pulled a notebook from inside his breastplate. "For the record, sir, could you tell me what happened to you earlier today?"

Watch house? Local police? O'Neill speculated. Speculation hurt. He gave up doing it.

"I don't remember much of it," O'Neill sat up again and rubbed the back of his head. Sitting up wasn't so bad this time, he managed to sustain the effort. "I feel like I've been hit by a tonne of bricks."

"That would have been Dolomite the bouncer, I suspect sir."

O'Neill shrugged that one off. "The last thing I remember was walking into a pub called…" He stopped. What was it called? It was very nearly the last thing he remembered.

"The Mended Drum," Carrot prompted.

O'Neill nodded. Memory flooded back. A groan threatened to escape from his lips. "Yeah that was the one. There was a monkey at the bar."

"The Librarian."

"The what?"

"He's an Orangutan, sir, an ape if you must, but not a monkey. Never! I suspect the difference is going to be crucial to the rest of your story sir."

O'Neill winced at a memory that kept thumping him in the head, or someone thumping him on the head. He rubbed the giant lump on the back of his head and drew a breath. The movement was uncomfortable but not painful. No ribs were broken then. That was small comfort; everything else felt broken. "I remember asking the bartender how come they had a monkey at the bar, and…it's blank after that."

Carrot opened his notebook and consulted it carefully. "Ah," he licked his lip and placed his finger on the page to track the words, or hold them in place, O'Neill was uncertain which. "You missed a great deal of the action then sir. The incident occurred at 11:23 antimeridian. The aforementioned 'monkey' (AKA, the Unseen University Librarian) used you, identity unknown, to knock down your companion (identity also unknown but herewith described as the large man with the gold embossing on his head). You were swung by the ankles, I believe, with great vigour according to many reliable witnesses."

Memories rushed back. O'Neill groaned.

"We suspect that you were already unconscious by this stage," Carrot continued, "since you had already used your face to stop the Librarian's fist moments earlier. After impeding that blow, you fell to the floor whereupon you remained immobile for several seconds before the Librarian proceeded to knock your companions down."

Carrot flipped to the next page of his notebook before continuing. O'Neill shook his head. It hurt so he stopped doing it.

"There ensued a substantial fight," Carrot read, "in which seventeen chairs, four tables, twenty nine glasses and one monocle were broken. We are unable to locate the owner of the monocle, but I am sure he will turn up eventually if we keep an eye out for him."

Carrot consulted another piece of paper before adding anything more to the story.

"The damage's bill comes to fifty three dollars and twelve pence according to the accounting firm of Rippem Off and Runn. If I were you I would get another assessment of the damage. R.O&R have a slightly shop-soiled reputation in this town."

Captain carrot flipped over another page of his notebook.

"Two mercenary troops and three barbarian heroes were seriously injured in the subsequent melee. 

"Neither of the troopers is suing for the loss of income due to their recuperation time but there is a charge of deafness caused by being too close to a loud bang. The details of this suit against you will be made available at a later date by the bailiffs. Should you require advanced notification of the details they can be made available from the offices of their solicitor. Mr Slant. He is a zombie so you can feel free to drop in on his chambers at any time."

"A zombie?" O'Neill muttered. "A zombie?" He had always thought that about Lawyers and there it was proven. QED.

Carrot ignored O'Neill and continued his recount with undiminished vigour. "One of your companions will be required to answer to that one at a later date, both in the civil court and in the presence of the Patrician. That charge of causing deafness is in addition to the collective charge of disturbing the peace against which all of you will be required to answer."

Captain Carrot closed his notebook firmly. He leant forward for emphasis. "Your other companion used a gonne sir," he said earnestly. "He fired the gonne in such a manner that it's projectile was launched into the air, knocking a new hole in the roof of the Drum. Its passage also saw it chipping a piece from the arm of constable Downspout, who just so happens was watching the entire event from a vantage point above the Drum. 

"I think you should be aware that he is not terribly impressed with that sir. I think your companion should avoid any contact with Downspout for a few days. It would save a lot of bother."

Carrot drew a laboured breath. He said the rest of his prepared speech with the obvious reluctance of a decent man who regrets the indecency in others. "The thing is, the thing is, I should point out that Mr Vimes takes a dim view on the use of gonnes in this city. A very dim view indeed, especially after the last time one was loose in Ankh Morpork." He sighed heavily, "and you people brought a great number of them into the city. It is with great regret that I must tell you that Mr Vimes will be quite put out."

From the far corner of the room, "I think he'll go spare, myself," suggested another voice. O'Neill turned in the direction of the new voice and saw… something humanoid, perhaps. Certainly advanced simian, and rather patchily coloured. He hadn't been aware that there was anyone else in the room.

"Nobby, I think you might need to tell Mr Vimes what happened this morning," Carrot told the humanoid.

"It's still early," The Nobby thing complained. "You know he was out with the night shift last night. He might not even be out of bed yet."

"Still," chided Carrot.

"He'll go Librarian Poo," Nobby complained. "He'll go…" Nobby struggled to think of something worse than Librarian Poo and really couldn't.

"Ah, he might," said Carrot. "But it won't be half as big a pile as might occur if he finds out later on."

"Yeah, OK," said Nobby uncertainly.

"Take Fred Colon with you," Carrot suggested.

"Good idea," Nobby agreed and sidled through the half open door.

"Are the rest of my team alright?" O'Neill asked.

"They are, yes sir," Carrot agreed. "They all being held in other cells within this building pending our inquiries."

"Funny," O'Neill commented in an off hand manner. "We only went into that pub to try to find someone in authority. I suppose we succeeded."

"You've gotten the opportunity to see people with a great deal more authority than I," Carrot agreed. "You'll get to meet Commander Vimes." 

That was said with such significance that O'Neill was forced to ask, "Who's commander Vimes?"

"Ah, well…" and that was as far as Carrot got before…

"Igor has his report ready," said a voice from the cell door. O'Neill looked over for the person using the voice and saw an empty doorway. He lowered his sights and came up with a tiny beared man with more armour than the fifth battalion and a giant axe on his belt. For all the armoury, O'Neill was stuck by the sudden and totally irrelevant thought that th etiny man should have been singing a "hi ho, hi ho" song.

"I'll be right with you," Carrot said and that answer seemed top satisfy the dwarf who scuttled off. Carrot returned his attention to O'Neill. "Now sir as to lunch. The watch-house cafeteria does a great line in bacon and cheese sandwiches…"

*

Daniel Jackson woke to the same head ache and bladder problem as the rest of his team. Like them he was an unhappy chappie, locked in a cell with a thumping head ache that seemed expansionary.

He explored his back, legs and arms and decided that every bone in his body was broken. One eye fluttered reluctantly open. He found himself lying in a cell, resting on a hard timber bunk. It was dingy and damp and the smells from long departed occupants were more of an assault than an odour. He shoved his other eye open with a herculean effort and tried to find out a few details about his surroundings. Moving his head turned out to be a bad idea. It felt like it was going to fall off.

Over the sound of hammers beating up his brain he heard something else. Something outside of his own head. He had to find out what it was. It might be important. It meant moving his head to see what it was and he really didn't want to do that. The sacrifices that we make…

He did so - reluctantly and slowly - but surely all the same.

A remarkably gorgeous blond haired woman was watching his progress toward consciousness from the other side of the cell. She was dressed in a short chain mail skirt and a very well beaten breastplate. Her hair was a glowing golden mane that cascaded most of the way down her back. Her expression went beyond serious to grave. She watched his waking efforts carefully as though making notes for future refernece.

Oh, well, thought Jackson, you can't have everything.

She was leaning nonchalantly into the vee between the cell door and the heavily fortified brick wall. Something about her posture suggested that she had no doubt about her ascendancy in their relationship.

"OK," Jackson mumbled. The sound made his head hurt some more. "I sort of vaguely got the whole heaven part right. Never would have picked the chain mail or the bricks and the bars, or the bruises myself, but otherwise it's just about perfect."

Sergeant Delphine Angua Von Uberwald of the Ankh Morpork City Watch, called Angua for short, pushed herself athletically away from the cell wall and strolled slowly across the rough cobbled floor until she stood with her knees almost beside Daniel's face. He watched her progress with interest, distracted from his own headache and bad bruises by the sight of her in motion. Her walk was measured and graceful, but it had the grace of a predatory animal. Her head tilted to one side as though she was contemplating which side of his throat to bite. Daniel had the vaguely uneasy feeling that she might use her teeth rather than her lips. Was there such a thing as a blonde vampire? He suddenly though that it might be so.

"Technically you're here in the cells for disturbing the peace," she said. "It's our idiosyncratic way of protecting you from the rest of this town until we can find more substantial charges to lay against you. Carrot is working on that now."

"I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about," Daniel groaned.

She sat on a stool, crossed long bare legs distractingly. "Why did you bring a gonne into Anhk Morpork?" she asked. "Everyone on the disc knows what Mr Vimes thinks of those things."

Jackson would have shaken his head at that moment, but even the though of moving made his head hurt more and his nausea well back up.

"Mr Vimes…?" he asked weakly. "Who might that be?"

Angua shook her head, sending her blonde mane flying. "Oh dear," she sighed. "I think I have a little explaining to do."


	5. Chapter 5

Duchess Sybil Ramkin Vimes was probably the richest woman in Ankh Morpork. She was also one of the largest and her own delicate condition, as they say, was not helping her to control her girth.

She woke to find herself in her bed, alone, again. It was at least the tenth time this month that her husband Samuel had been dragged from his bed before the day had progressed to a decent hour and he was already off doing whatever it was that he did with his day. She heard stories, second and third hand, little more than rumours really, about midnight chases across moonlit rooftops. She had once been witness to the way her Samuel conducted himself in his work-a-day role while he was acting as the Official Ankh Morpork representative at the Dwarfish High-King's coronation recently in Uberwald.

She had been forced to conclude that the stories of his nature had not been exaggerated. And yet he was such a gentle man. Not a gentleman certainly, because that was such an ironic term, but a gentle man. The dichotomy was wrenching.

She was lucky she had him. And not just for the luck of finding a man like him, but luck that she still had him.

There was the small matter of the occasional, and so far unsuccessful, assassination attempts. 

The Vimes' had only recently repaired yet another hole in the roof of their sitting room. Sam had been quite upset about the loss of one of her tiny swamp dragons, although he had to admit that there were extenuating circumstances in the poor assassins' favour. He had been trying to save his own skin at the time and had been forced to kill the dragon to do so.

Sybil gave up trying to summons her husband back home through will power alone and decided she had better face the day, alone, again.

And so she had pottered around the house for half of the day, attending to her dragons.

Her chambermaid interrupted Sybil's routine. The poor girl was one of the interchangeable Emma's, as Sam referred to them when he thought she could not hear him. They all looked the same to him, earnest horse faced girls. In this instance the maid's name happened to be Emma, to the poor girl's detriment.

"What is it Emma?" Sybil asked.

The girl looked positively wretched. "There's a watchman at the door, Madame," she supplied and then her expression became even more woebegone, if that were possible. 

"Oh no," Sybil hissed. Her hand shot to her mouth. She had dreaded this moment, the day when one of them came to give her the bad news. The nausea she felt was entirely unrelated to the delicacy of her condition, and more to do with the sick dread she had nursed for every day of the few years she had shared with Samuel Vimes.

She quickly wiped her hands and made for the door.

Nobby Nobbs and Fred Colon stood in her sitting room, anxiously clutching their helmets in their hands. Nobby had gone to a great deal of trouble to spruce himself, slicking his hair and cleaning his face before he arrived. It made little difference to his appearance, but he felt the effort was required. Sybil had an unaccountable soft spot for Nobby - but then she took in stray dragons - and consequently Nobby went t a great deal of trouble to continue impressing her. Sybil smiled briefly at his presence. There is no accounting for some people's taste.

It would be those two, she thought uncomfortably. She had always hoped it would be the courageous and earnest Captain Carrot who brought the bad news, if it had to come. It had never occurred to her that the duty might fall to his most long serving Watchmen.

She steeled herself for the worst.

Fred Colon watched her entrance anxiously, steeling himself to tell her what he had been charged to convey. For one brief moment they stared across the expanse of her expensively decorated sitting room at each other and tried to out metallic one another. Which got them nowhere.

She decided to brazen it out. She strode across the room forthrightly.

"Out with it Fred," she commanded like a valkery. "It can't be any worse than you're making it look." Knowing full well that it certainly could.

"It's about Mr Vimes," Fred stammered.

"Captain Carrot asked us to come up here," explained Nobby.

"Why didn't he come himself?" Sybil demanded.

"He was busy, so he dispatched us," Fred Colon explained.

"How could he do that, with news as important as this." Sybil had replaced her dread with consternation. How dare he dismiss Samuel Vimes in that manner? "I'm of a mind to go down there and have a word to Captain Carrot about this myself. If he can't bring the news himself then he does not deserve to be an officer."

"I told him we shouldn't go and wake him up Sarge," Nobby said.

"Come on," Sybil called, "you two can escort me to…" She stopped, replayed the conversation in her own mind. Her lips moved.

"Wake who up?" she asked finally. Her voice was dangerously quiet.

"Mr Vimes," Nobby explained. "I was…and Carrot said…and Fred thought it would be a good…"

Sybil had an idea. Suddenly she was aware that the obvious momentum of the conversation - and the follow up actions that she was planning - were not going anything like the way she had anticipated, and that perhaps the fault in this mis-communication was hers.

"Let's try that with the gaps filled in, please Nobby," she suggested reasonably.

Nobby drew a breath into the nest of ribs that he called his chest. "CaptainCarrotsentmetotellMrVimesthatwe'vefoundanothergonneintown," he said in a rush. "Ma'am." It all came out as one long word and Syble spent a moment adding all the spaces between the words inside her own head. Captain Carrot sent me to tell Mr Vimes that we've found another gonne in town.

"Well he's not here," Sybil said quietly. "Isn't he with you? Working?"

"No."

"Then where is he?" she asked rhetorically. Nobby and Colon looked at one another as though trying to decide if one or the other or neither of them was expected to answer her. Instead, she turned away before either could speak. 'Willikins!" she called.

The butler appeared, immaculate as usual. "Yes ma'am," he bowed.

"Where is Sam?"

"He is at the Patrician's palace, ma'am."

"Oh," said Nobby and Colon in unison. "Damn." It was bad enough the nature of the news they were entrusted to deliver to Sam Vimes, delivering it to Lord Vetenary was going to be an order of magnitude worse. Vetenary had once been shot by one of those gonne things. His dislike for them was more fundamental than they dislike harboured by Sam Vimes.

*

"You've never heard of Samual Vimes?" Angua asked. Her head tilted to one side while she regarded Daniel Jackson carefully. "Where did you say you came from?"

"Earth," Jackson said. He pushed himself up right and was gratified by the lack of dizziness.

"I've never hear of that. Is it up in the Rim mountains?"

"No," Jackson said, with the air of a University Lecturer about to let fly. "It circles another star. We came through a gate between the stars." He could see that he was in danger of losing his audience here. "We come in peace," he finished lamely.

"We could tell that," Angua replied wit heavy irony, "by the number of gonnes you carried."

"Those well…"

"Yes those."

"Um."

"Another star you say? Like our sun? It is a feeble thing that orbits the disc, surely you come from a disc much like ours?"

"If you say so…"

Angua did the tilted head regarding him levelly thing again. "I still have trouble coming to grips with the idea that someone could be in Ankh Morpork without knowing who Samuel Vimes is."

*

Samuel Vimes started out life as a street urchin who graduated to street gang member before he became a street cop. And somehow, now he was the Duke of Ankh, a progression aided by his marriage, without doubt, but seemingly punctuated by a series of citywide crisis that always seemed to fall into his lap for him to unravel. There were times when he thought his entire existence might be just one long alcohol induced hallucination. That would be one tenable conclusion in his occasionally introspective moments, when he mad strenuous attempts to explain how a drunken street cop could become the Duke of Ankh. The transition of his life still left him puzzled. It had seemed like only yesterday that he had woken up, nursing the oh-god of hang overs in the gutter outside the Mended Drum while the city was under siege by a mythical dragon. That had been the turning point of his life. And the ironic thing about the whole train of events that followed the dragon's ascendancy had been the fall from grace along the opposite route of one of his street gang rivals (for want of a term) a man who had previously risen to such mighty heights ahead of Vimes.

And now the city faced another crisis, and again Sam Vimes was at the centre of it. Ah, the reward for a job well done, he remarked to himself, was another, harder job.

He struck a match against Detritus's belly. It flared for a moment before it settled to a flickering lick of flame. He watched it for a moment, puzzled. It seemed to be blown by a breeze that came from the stone wall behind the desk. Vimes lit the end of his cigar with the feeble little flame while he regarded the wall closely.

"Dat was me sir," Detritus chided, watching Vimes extinguish the match by waving it in the air. The giant troll was stooped beneath the low ceiling of the oblong office. The whirr of his air-cooled helmet was loud within the confines of the Patrician's office. Having a Silicon semi-conductor brain, the trolls were best suited to a climate where semi-conductor physics allowed the ready passage of electrons through their doped silicon brains. The colder the better when it came to trollish intellectualisation. They thrived in the mountainous regions, where the snow never melted. Up there, where the air was so cold it had teeth, the trolls were at the top of the Food Chain. In the more temperate climate of Ankh Morpork their brains were more like the mineral used by the dwarfs when they were smelting the metal to make the links of a chain.

The late Cuddy, one of the first dwarfs inducted into the City Watch, had been the first to come upon the idea of the air-cooled helmet. Detritus had leapt at the idea, embracing it with the sort of whole hearted, one tracked obsession only someone with a brain made of doped silicon and germanium could manage.

"Sorry," Vimes said absently. "It's only that Sybil has stopped me from lighting these things with dragons."

"I unnerstan sir," Detritus said loyally.

Vimes and Detritus watched on while Cheri Littlebottom made busy examining the fixtures and furnishings that made up the Patrician's office. They didn't amount to much. He was a man with simple tastes and his office went essentially undecorated. Whenever Vimes was in the oblong office he was always acutely aware of that lack of ornamentation. It made dealing with Vetenary such a challenge. The man left no handle lying around to be the subject of small talk. In fact when Vimes wrapped his mind around the whole Vetenary conundrum, the man made him more and more confused. He was so iconoclastic that no one was actually sure where he lived. 

Littlebottom finished examining the desk draws. She blew the fine white dust from the draw handles that she had taken such great care to apply. No fingerprints were revealed. 

The dwarf had selected a fetching floral combo today, contrasting pink and pastel green with her chain mail and war axe accessories. Vimes wondered where you could get floral printed leather. But this was Ankh Morpork he reminded himself, you could get just about anything in Ankh Morpork. 

At least now under the tutelage of Sergeant Angua, Cheri Littlebottom had tamed the excesses that marked her early attempts at make-up and they had now reached some sort of happy medium in her search for femininity. It was an alien concept to the dwarf community. Dwarf mating rituals involved a lot of faith and hope, since there was no external signal among the mass of chain mail, leather and armour to allow one bearded gender to accurately assess the other. The recent appearance of dwarf 'girls', of which Cheri was one of the first, was the cause of serious concern among her people.

Now if they could just do something about Nobby's experimentation along the same lines, Vimes thought, then things would be stable in the Watch.

"How can he just disappear?" Vimes asked. He didn't expect an answer from Cheri, no, not yet, she needed time to make her forensic assessments. Nor did he expect an answer from Detritus, that was asking a bit much. Take him up into the mountains and he would probably work it out in two seconds, but down here…No.

"Dunno sir," Detritus answered. He tapped his nose. It made a sound like a pick hammer tapping a piton into a granite cliff face, probably because it was not much different. "This looks like pol..it..ics to me. I know people say I as fick as a plank sanwich, but I can tell which side of da bred is buttered."

"Which side is that Sergeant?"

"The side with the gooey yellow stuff…"

Vines allowed himself one small cynically, pleased smile, happy that some things never change.

"Cheri is there anything at all?" he asked.

"Nothing sir. No sign of anything suspicious. He was the only person in here. No stray hairs, no cigar ash." She looked pointedly at the cigar suspended between Vimes' fingers. He managed to look unembarrassed. It took a great deal of effort and drew upon his experience on the streets, but he pulled it off.

"So where is he?"

"Sorry Sir, I have no idea."

Vimes looked around the room and considered the options. The guilds had been quiet lately. While Vimes was recently away in Uberwald, Carrot had been away chasing after Angua and they had left Fred Colon in charge of the Watch. It had been a tense time throughout the city. The guilds had remained very quiet while he had been away, knowing that there was going to be a period of tension immediately after Vimes' return. When he found the state of the city and the Watch who looked after it, they knew that Vimes was going to undergo considerable stress. When the watch commander is feeling stressed he tends to share it around. And that had been the case for a couple of months now.

Thankfully for the guild heads, Carrot had gotten back first. Or so they thought, at first. It was only then that they found out something unexpectedly unpleasant. The whole city found out, to its chagrin in many cases, that in many things Carrot and Vimes could be interchangeable. 

But would they still be quiet? Vimes wondered. Now that the initial over zealous reaction to Colon's steward-ship had subsided and the world watched and waited while a new agreement between Ankh Morpork and the giant untamed wilderness of the Uberwald slowly became obvious. There was a delegation coming over from Uberwald, due to arrive within the next couple of days. Not ambassadors as such because Uberwald was still a long way from being anything more advanced that a collection of feudal baronies, but representatives of the leading citizens of the area. They were going to participate in a ceremony to ratify the agreements reached between Ankh Morpork and the newly crowned Low King during Vimes' recent visit. It would be the golden opportunity for a guild leader to make a play for the oblong office.

So which one would it be? Who among the squabbling factions that managed the city of Ankh Morpork couldn't help placing his spoon in the brew and stirring?

"Normally I would suspect Lord Downey," Vimes ruminated out loud. "But that's too obvious. I always suspect the assassins. For some reason every time a high profile member of society disappears, the trail somehow always leads to them. Funny how that works."

Detritus and Littlebottom watched Vimes carefully. He was a trifle scary in his deep thinking mode.

"Lord Vetinari's bounty has been set temptingly high sir," Cheri suggested timorously. "Almost as high as yours. The assassins have been very quiet lately."

Vimes tasted the idea, a concept he had picked up in Uberwald.

"They have too much invested in the status quo," Vimes commented dryly. 

"Still, they have been quiet lately."

Vimes smiled evilly. "I guess that's suspicious enough by itself. Let's talk to them shall we." He pointed to Detritus, "fetch Lord Downey for me. Oh and Cheri, you might want to explore the secret passage that's hidden behind that wall."

He pointed. 

Cheri stared. "How…? Never mind."

"On second thoughts," Vimes corrected himself thoughtfully. "Go get Angua. I think we might need her help getting through that maze."

"Why sir?"

He raised an ironic eyebrow. "A secret passage leading from the Patricians office… Oh come on Littlebotton."

"Ah yes."

Detritus lurched from the room. He had to step aside to allow Fred Colon and Nobby to walk through the door.

*

Fred Colon and Nobby had finally found Samuel Vimes and were far from happy about where they had found him. They had gone up to his house without success and had taken a few moments to shake off a persistent Sybil Ramkin Vimes who had been unaccountably insistent in her desire to see her husband and to make sure he was all right.

"It's because she's expecting," Fred had confided in Nobby.

"Ah, I see," Nobby replied gravely.

They had walked on for a while in that characteristic shuffle of the beat copper that seems to involve the minimum of actual motion while achieving a surprisingly stead pace.

"Expecting what Fred?" Nobby had asked.

Fred Colon had shaken his head and walked on.

Nobby trailed along behind shaking his head for a different reason. They hadn't spoken from then until they found themselves in the Patrician's office.

And now they stood before Sam Vimes and if Fred was any judge of body language, some one was deeply embedded in the manure. It wasn't a good time to tell Sam Vimes about the gonne he decided. Fred pushed Nobby forward. "Nobby has something to tell you sir," Fred suggested.

*

Teal'c explained about the Goa'uld to the Igor. He explained about how they dominated human space by dominating the human body.

"What a wonderful opportunity to investigate the workingth of life firtht hand," said Igor. "If you don't mind my thaying tho thir."

Teal'c looked around for a towel so he could wipe his face. He couldn't find one. The palm of his hand was just not good enough.

*

Lord Downey of the Assassin's guild watched the quorum of his management council from beneath heavy lidded eyes. On the desk before him was the morning's issue of the Anhk Morpork Times. The headlines read "Brawl in the Drum ended with a bang."

"Sacharissa hasn't lost her touch with headlines I see," was the comment from the council. Downey looked over his council and tried to find the face that fitted the voice. Ah there he was at the end, Peter Mansell-Smith. Like all the other assassins he was dressed in black. The whole room looked like a gap in space were light failed to escape, there was so much black cloth being employed.

"Have you read it yet?" Downey asked them collectively.

"Yes," chorused the team. It took several seconds for them all to join the chorus but they finally managed.

"A gonne," Downey concluded. "It must be. More than one, if this is to be believed." Downey tapped the paper with his index finger. His eye traced the sub-title of the news sheet. It said 'the truth shall set your fee.' Always the way, he thought. Slant would probably see that one and chuckle. "We still don't know what happened to the last one."

"There's always that rumour," said the same voice. Peter Mansell-Smith continued after a glance from Downey. "You know, the one that said Captain Carrot had it buried with Cuddy the dwarf."

Downey rubbed his hands across this forehead. At some stage Downey was going to have to address the whole Mansell-Smith situation. The man's rise through the ranks was starting to look like it had the sort of momentum that might one day carry him to the same chair that Downey had occupied since the unfortunate events surrounding the passing of Dr Cruses. "That would be a comforting thought," Downey commented. He looked up at the gathered assassins. "We know that Cuddy is still buried?" For some reason he was put in mind of an undertakers convention.

"It's been checked already," Mansell-Smith said. "His grave remains undisturbed."

Yes, altogether too much momentum.

"Well that is one blessing at least," Downey commented.

"We don't have any other ideas." Well at least Mansell-Smith hadn't totally undermined Downey's authority. One day he was going to have to find out how Vimes kept Carrot from taking over the City Watch. Vimes had been dealing with a highly competent subordinate for a long time now. There had to be a trick to it.

"Make some inquiries in the street of cunning artificers," Downey instructed. It was nice to make a decisive contribution to the process. "If anyone could reproduce that thing we would find them among the dwarfs that hang around down there."

Their conversation was interrupted by a knock at the door. A student poked his head through the door and then ducked as though dodging a knife. In most of the doorways of the Assassin's guild that was a valuable reflex. 

"Lord Downey," the junior assassin said. "There's a watchman at the door. It's that troll Detritus. Apparently the Duke of Ankh has requested your presence, sir."

It is always hard to say no to Detritus, unless of course it is the kind of no that is part of a scream of, "No, no, please don't. No!"

"What does Vimes want this time?" Downey asked no one in particular. The question was intended rhetorically. Downey waved a dismissal and sent his council on it's way before one of them was tempted to answer. He gathered his cape and marched for the door.

*

Jack O'Neill was bored. 

He had counted the bars on his cell door. There was nine. 

He had counted the stones in the floor. There were two hundred and sixty seven - if you allowed for the half and quarter stones at the edges.

He climbed up on his bunk and stared through the little window and seen clouds drift by. He counted those but the answer only came to two before his neck started to hurt.

He climbed down.

What was left?

He could count his fingers… But he already knew how many of them he had.

*

Samuel Vimes marched along the corridor, puffing on his cigar. It was his one remaining vice now that he had stopped drinking. He intended to savour it.

Angua was leading both him and Cheri Littlebottom through the labyrinth. She had assumed her canine guise, and made her way along the corridor by stepping lightly from stone to stone in what appeared to the outside world to be a haphazard manner. Her nose tracked the Patrician's steps. 

Vimes watched her progress carefully, matching each of her footsteps after she skipped from stone to stone, as though his life depended on it. 

It did. 

The hallway through which they walked was littered with dozens of dangling knives, embedded swords, swinging candelabras, splashed nets and swaying morning stars, all of them attached to springs, mechanisms and ropes. Each of the implements had been released by the application of an errant foot to the wrong stone at some time in the past few hours.

Vimes noted the lack of blood or gore on any of them. It was that lack that caused him the most concern.

Vimes and Angua were threading their way from stone to stone, careful how they made their way through the booby-trapped corridor because the previous group who passed through this corridor might have missed one of the traps. 

Looking around him Vimes thought it couldn't have been much more that one; given the number of cunningly contrived weapons hanging in the hallway. He handled one vicious looking blade with care and then dropped it back on the floor.

Who was there, in Ankh Morpork, that the Patrician thought so badly of, that he would need this level of security to keep him in? 

Or keep others out? Vimes tasted that idea for a moment. After all it was Haverlock Vetenary they were dealing with here.

A few steps ahead, Angua rounded a bend in the corridor and the sound of her padded footfalls stopped suddenly. Vimes stepped up to join her. The corridor opened into a room. It was littered with paper and half-finished machinery. A window overlooked a Bloody Stupid garden. Beneath the clutter of paper the room was furnished with quality fixtures.

Neither Vimes nor Angua saw the clutter of course. It all paled into insignificance compared to the giant stone contraption filling the corner of the room. 

All eyes were locked on the gaping maw contained within the stargate.

"Oh bugger," said Samuel Vimes. He pulled his cigar from his slack lower lip before it fell to the floor. With the amount of paper scattered about, that was a wise reaction. Vimes shook his head, placed the butt of the cigar into his mouth, flinched at the pain with an absent grimace, pulled it from his mouth, reversed it and then puffed on the cigar a few frantic times. Then he blinked.

A sound like someone extruding a piece of meat through a metal sheeting press filled the silence behind Vimes.

"The bloody wizards," Vimes half said, or perhaps asked, even he wasn't sure which. "They've broken through to the dungeon dimensions again,".

A discreet cough sounded behind him, breaking the spell.

"Um sir," Angua asked. "If we're going to stay here for a while, then…Could I borrow your shirt."

Vimes turned slowly, already certain of what he would see, and in the aftermath of seeing the stargate for the first time, he realised that he didn't care. 

Well, he thought, at least surrendering his shirt would free up her hands and arms to do something more useful than cover up the bits of her anatomy that were different to the ones that Vimes had in those same places.

"Don't let any one else in here until the wizards get here," Vimes said to Cheri. "I think we're going to be busy today."


	6. Chapter 6

Lord Downey seated him self in Vimes' office and regarded the pile of unattended paper that filled his in-tray with the supercilious air of someone who employed a secretary so that he didn't have to deal with such mundane matters. He could think that way. It wasn't as though his guild members were exactly busy. The disc's political stability in the century of the fruit bat hadn't provided them with an overload. They were getting quite selective, the assassins, in the work that they undertook - other than the occasional attempt on Vimes' life, what with the bounty that had been set, the temptation got to some people. They had to try it on. So he had time to get his paperwork done.

If Vimes hired a secretary, they would find themselves investigating crime scenes within a few days, so it would make no difference to the way the office operated, but Downey wasn't to learn that.

Besides, if Vimes had time to do his paper work, he would probably find another job to do in any case.

Vimes and Downey exchanged pleasantries for a few moments, mouthing inanities that did not require either of them to pay attention to what was being said. In Vimes' case that involved grinding his teeth and trying not to smash the man's face in. The number of assassins he had been forced to fish out of the little traps Vimes built into his home and office was a constant source of annoyance to Vimes. He had developed a deep-seated aversion to the assassins and it was firmly focussed on the head of the organisation.

Politics ruled, of course, and Vimes had to deal with the man as much as he detested doing so. He made sure his feelings on the matter were known. It was more fun that way. Downey was aware of the antipathy, was more acutely aware of how personal it was and that made him quite uncomfortable. He was more accustomed to the good-old-boy mentality that went with the sort of education passed on from one unsuspecting generation to the next by such institutions as the Assassin's guild school. In that mode of interaction th dance of small talk was all part of the game.

Raised on the streets of Ankh Morpork, Vimes had never developed the attitude that allowed people like Downey to hire bodyguards, whose sole role it was to die so that someone else, namely Downey, might survive the game of hired assassin. There was a certain degree of two-faced-ness avout the whole thing that rankled Vimes.

"The Guilds will have to be notified," Lord Downey said into the uncomfortable silence that followed the inanities. "If only because we'll need to elect a new, acting Patrician to meet the delegation from Uberwald."

Vimes had been the delegate who went to Uberwald to attend the funeral for Low King of the Dwarfs. The place was a feudal nightmare filled with people from the stories that kept people awake at night. The place was governed - if you could call it that - by the vampire, the werewolves and the dwarfs.

Vimes was uncomfortably aware of how delicate the diplomatic situation in Ankh Morpork might become if the Patrician was missing. The idea that some of the delegates from Uberwald meeting some one, no matter how well qualified, other than the officially ratified head of state in Ankh Morpork did not bear considering.

"I thing something like that can wait until we establish that he's actually dead," Vimes told Downey cuttingly. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves."

Sometimes it's not possible to dismiss ideas with words. Sometimes ideas have a life of their own.

Conversation lapsed while Downey and Vimes considered the down side implications behind that simple statement uttered by Samuel Vimes. 

Despite the many attempts that had been made, Havelock Vetinari had always proved notoriously difficult to remove from office. 

Brute force had failed dismally, back when one prominent member of Ankh Morpork society had summonsed a dragon. It had terrorised the town for a while, and even managed - temporarily - to unseat the Patrician but then it had unaccountably found other interests. 

Assassination by gonne had not been successful either. Although to be fair, a few drops of the Vetinari blood had been spilled in the plot devised by the previous head of the Assassin's guild during his final moments before madness and a good man's blade had claimed him. 

Subtle poisoning hadn't removed Vetenary from office, and neither had the kidnapping and the substitution of a double to implicate Vetenary in the attempted murder of his secretary.

The man had proved almost indestructible and remarkably duplicitous throughout that time.

The idea that someone might actually have managed to kill Vetenari was a difficult idea to swallow.

"I don't normally believe in coincidence," Vimes told Downey. He waved his cigar about. "But I think I can make a distinction in this case. The thing at the end of the secret passageway off the side of Vetenary's office is one thing. That had the look of the alchemists - or perhaps the wizards - about it. Either of them will explain it, or get rid of it. That can be dealt with. It's the sudden appearance of gonnes in the city that worries me. That is another thing altogether. How did they get here? And where did they come from? Did someone else come upon the means to manufacture them?"

"All I can tell you is that it was not through the Assassin's guild," Downey denied. "You have the men who carried them. Haven't they told you where they got them from?" He finished indignantly.

Vimes wasn't inclined to share that story with Downey, not before he had a chance to hear it from the horse's mouth. This appointment with the head of the Assassin's guild had been made before Vimes had become aware of the stargate hiding on the other side of the wall behind Vetenary's office wall. This situation was developing an omminous momentum of it's own and Vimes was starting to harbour concerns.

"If even there was going to be a means of successfully assassinating Vetenary it was going involve the use of a gonne," Vimes thought out loud.

"So that means it has to be the assassins," Downey said. "Is that what you're implying?"

"It has something to do with that thing in Vetenary's secret chamber," Vimes countered. "They're related."

Downey seized the conversational opportunity. "Since the Wizards are responsible for this situation," Downey suggested, "shouldn't you be speaking with them?"

"You're suggesting that whatever is on the other side of that portal, it supplied men with gonnes." Which thought had also occurred to Vimes, but he was not so enamoured of that concept. In Vimes' experience machines and magic didn't mix. You either worked with one or you worked with the other.

"It's one valid theory."

"Tentacles," Vimes stated. "That is what we normally expect to see when something like that opens up on the disc. Gonnes are somewhat too impersonal for the things that come through from the dungeon dimensions. Gonnes are a uniquely human thing."

"The wizards are involved," Downey offered. "I'm sure of that."

Vimes sat back. "Perhaps," he conceded, "On the surface it does look that way." Vimes said the last carefully, as though tasting the idea. Inwardly he felt differently about the idea. Ha, there, he thought, I've learnt one of the tricks of diplomacy. How to lie without actually doing so. Downey seemed mollified. Vimes decided to mull him a bit more. "Mistrum Ridcully and I have an appointment. With a few more facts at my disposal, I might be able to come to the same conclusion that you've drawn, so quickly, but only after I've had a chance to speak with him," and then because he couldn't help himself, Vimes added, "since I don't have the benefit of your intuition on this matter. Must have something to do with the Assassin's guild education I hear everyone raving about."

*

Lord Downey had left, and had only been gone from Vimes' office for only a few minutes before Carrot brought one of the prisoners in to replace him. He sat in the same chair and looked around thoughtfully.

Bwfore dealing with this new problem, there were other matters to attend to. Vimes poked his head out through the office door and found Nobby in the hallway. He was sort of sidling away as though he was worried that hanging around up here in Pseudopolis Yard might be a good way to find another job and the fewer pople who saw him up there the better. It didn't work.

"Nobby," Vimes suggested. 

Nobby stopped, he looked like a small furry creature in the headlights of a transcontinental haulage truck. "Yes, Mr Vimes."

"Go round up Mistrum Ridcully and have him meet me at the Patrician's secret compartment."

Nobby could handle that. He nodded once and was gone.

Vimes stepped back into his office and re-took his seat. While he did that Vimes took the time to assess the man sitting opposite from him, savour his first impressions of the man and realised that he was doing the same thing to Sam Vimes. The prisoner watched him with the air of a man summing up another and not yet sure what sort of conclusion to reach. If some one drew a line on the desk it might well mark the boundary of a mirror.

The prisoner was an interesting sight. He carried himself with the sort of hard won poise of either a street fighter or a military man, Vimes concluded after watching him and his bearing. Long term military, Vimes decided in the end. And it was a conclusion that left Vimes with a chill. Because it meant more politics! 

So, which of their 'friendly' neighbouring powers had dispatched a team of mercenaries into the city? He wasn't going to find out by guessing. It was only through asking questions and assessing the information supplied - using a few of those good old fashioned policeman's instincts - that he might be able to reach any sort of conclusions.

The prisoner sat in the chair provided and waited for Vimes to begin. The man was much the same age as Sam Vimes, his face was lined through worry; his hair was greying with the passing of hard years. O'Neill and Vimes might have been mirror images of each other. They both wore expressions like seven days of bad weather. It was like a sad sack contest between the champions of two continents.

Carrot's report listed the prisoner's name as Jack O'Neill.

"I have this problem," Vimes told Jack O'Neill. 

O'Neill had looked around Vimes' office and recognised it for what it was. It was the same sort of office that O'Neill had back in SGC. One that was only used to collect the mail, and fill out reports, when he remembered to do it. It was the office of a busy man with things to do at the front lines. It was a field office in a permanent building.

A pile of paper threatened to fall off the desk and onto the floor. Captain Carrot eyed the pile with wary interest from his position partially behind the desk. 

The intimidating presence of Sergeants Detritus and Angua rested either side of the door. O'Neill ignored them. After dealing with the Goa'uld, the hulking presence of a stone troll filling half the room was nothing unusual as far as threats went.

"The Patrician disappears," Vimes stated, "and you appear almost simultaneously…" Vimes waited for a response. He folded his hands on the desk and leant onto his elbows. No answer was forthcoming so he continued. "And in the middle of it all, I find a…thing, that looks like it's the short-cut to the dungeon dimensions that the wizards have been threatened to create since the turtle was an egg."

O'Neill conceded one quick nod as an answer.

"But the thing doesn't smell right," Vimes continued. He tapped his forefinger on the desk. "There's nothing crawling around on fifty foot tentacles chewing up the city. We haven't experienced the sudden loss of hundreds of innocent young women. Most of all, the University Librarian is sitting calmly in the Mended Drum drinking from a glass the size of a bucket as though nothing was happening. That sort of thing just does not go on in this town when the creatures from dungeon dimensions are loose. So I'm left with the other possibility. That you are just a man, just as you appear, but somehow you are responsible for today's confusion. That the thing in the Patrician's palace is a man made thing. Do you have any comments?"

O'Neill shifted in his chair and then frowned at Vimes. "I have no idea what you're talking about," O'Neill said, pretending to be confused. "Mostly." He was actually wondering what had happened to Samantha since she had been guarding their retreat and this guy had seen the stargate and hadn't mentioned her presence. "My team are nothing more than an exploratory team, almost ambassadors from another place."

"Angua," Vimes suggested. She stepped forward and placed three gonnes on the desk. "I believe these are yours," Vimes said to O'Neill.

O'Neill made a show of looking at them closely before he nodded slowly.

"That one was fired," Angua said and pointed to one of the gonnes. "It also smelled of the one called Daniel Jackson. This one," she looked significantly at O'Neill and then pointed to another of the gonnes. "Was yours. It has not been fired for some days."

How did she know that? O'Neill wondered. She was right, but how did she know?

"I have a thing about gonnes," Vimes said softly. "They kill people. They have no other purpose."

"That's true of every weapon," O'Neill said.

"No," Vimes said carefully. "Some weapons are a deterrent. They are large and visible and personal and they say, 'I have a weapon, don't try it on.' This," he said and tapped one of the gonnes, "is a thing that can kill from hiding, from a long way away, without means to know that the attempt is coming. It's not the same thing at all."

Vimes climbed to his feet and walked to the window of his office. Beneath the window he could see the repair made after the last hole was left in the roof of Pseudopolis yard during the most recent failed assassination attempt. The new tiles stood out from the rest of the tiles by their heightened colour and lack of pigeon droppings.

"You claim to be an ambassador," Vimes suggested carefully. "And you come bearing those. You want to explain that?"

No, O'Neill didn't want to explain that.

"Well…" Vimes prompted.

"We came through that gate…" O'Neill began.

"The thing in the Patrician's palace," Vimes clarified.

"Yeah. They're all over the galaxy and we're exploring them. The guns are for our protection, you never know what might be on the other side."

"Galaxy…?" Vimes queried. Not disc, he thought.

"Yeah."

Vimes pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger and then squeezed his eyes shut. He turned away from the window and regarded his prisoner from a position leaning against the windowsill.

"The gonne was fired…" Vimes suggested.

"Was it pointed at anyone?"

"No," Vimes conceded that one.

"So what are we here for? Does this watch of yours wait until after the brawls over and arrest the unconscious, or what?"

That was a telling blow. Vimes almost flinched. Once upon a time the watch had done just that. They used to be called the Watch because that's what they did. They watched.

Vimes reached a decision. "Come with me," he said to O'Neill. "There's something that you might be able to explain to me."

"Can I bring my team?" O'Neill asked hurriedly. In a battle, you should take advantage of every opening to drive home a dagger, and he was in no doubt that this conversation was a verbal fencing match.

"No," Vimes said, then he thought better of his first reaction. "Detritus, Carrot, come with me. Angua, round up," he checked a note on his desk. "Bring Daniel Jackson and Teal'c along, wait a bit after us, give us say about half an hour, enough time so Carrot and I can talk with Mr O'Neill first. Then meet us there."

Angua nodded as though she knew where 'there' was. O'Neill had a pretty good idea where there was as well.

*

Ponder Stibbons was young and bright and the head of the High Energy Magic Department of Unseen University. He had graduated to the position immediately after the completion of his degree in thaumalocical science and he now headed up a group of like minded scholars in their endeavours to understand the fundamental nature of the threadbare piece of space-time that surrounded the discworld. They were the guys who explored the edge of the known world of magic and most of what they did couldn't be describe by the language of the day, so they were forced to make up a lot of words. After a while it made their conversations almost indecipherable. 

Beside him stood the towering figure of Mistrum Ridcully, the Arch-chancellor of the same institution. He was huge man with a great deal too many huge dinners inside him. He had a personality to match his robust appearance. Ruddy faced and out going, he was the sort of man who thought that any long walk through the woods should have the express aim of killing something furry. That was the life. And in his opinion of the rest of life was simple. You got on with it. You confronted it and you marched forward. Sideways was not a direction.

IN the background stood Nobby, or rather Nobby drifted from place to place, handing things and trying not to break anything. The huge thing in the corner was making him nervous and he was looking to gather a few things for their own protection and then get out of there. Discretion got the better of him, and that said a lot about how much the sight of that thing in the corner had disturbed him. Nobby bolted.

Stibbons and Ridcully stood shoulder to shoulder and they contemplated the glowing maw of the stargate from their vastly differing perspective. Neither of them noticed Nobby's departure, their attention being dominated by the thing in the corner. 

"It certainly has the look of the dungeon dimensions about it," Ridcully offered. "It even has runes carved into the stone. Look, they go all the way around."

"Yes," agreed Stibbons carefully. It didn't pay to get too technical with the Arch-chancellor and he was having difficulty framing what he had to say in such a way that it wouldn't be misconstrued. He made his first try, carefully selecting his phrasing and then hazarded, "It looks more like something that the alchemists might make," he said.

"Nonsense man," Ridcully said affably. "If the alchemists made this there'd be a colossal charcoal covered hole in the wall, and this whole area would be full of smoke. No this is more the sort of work that a sorcerer might create."

Stibbons had to concede the truth of that. Whatever this thing was, it worked, and that automatically suggested the alchemists weren't involved, except…

"There was always that business with the moving pictures," Stibbons said. "That worked."

'For a while', went unspoken between them. Until the dungeon dimensions had broken through and ravished the city. That's what happened when amateurs fiddled with magic. Ravished virgins and crumbled ruins… and hard to clean up slimy tentacles that were always left behind.

Stibbons and Ridcully regarded the stargate again. Their expression mirrored one another, both pensively thoughtful. If the alchemists weren't involved, they both seemed to be thinking, then it was a sorcerer, and that suggested an eighth son of an eighth son of an eighth son. Wizards were recruited from the eighth son of an eighth son. A sorcerer was a wizard squared. Something like that would have been obvious no matter where it occurred on the disc world.

It had happened once before in the lifetime of the current occupants of the higher offices within the wizard's hierarchy, with disastrous results. 

You might call such a person a sorcerer, but in reality it was a 'sourcerer', the operative part was the 'source' part. They became a source of magic and that could be a bad thing - a really bad thing. It certainly had been a really bad thing the last time it happened, and it was only recently that the wizards had lived down that little faux par. 

It was by far the most compelling reason for the celibacy of wizards. Let them breed and they'd all have eight sons and the rest of the discworld would be a very unhappy place.

"What do you suppose we should do with it?" Stibbons asked. "We could take it back to our lab and let the team have a look at it."

"Ah… No," decided Ridcully instantly. He had visions. His hand shook at the idea.

*

William De Worde and Saccharissa represented Ankh Morpork's premier - and only - surviving newspaper, The Times. In fact, honesty would suggest that they were the Ankh Morpork Times. Other's might set the type, and take the iconographs and perform all those administrative tasks, but when it came to copy, headlines and editorial work, they were the whole deal. 

They waited patiently in the lobby of Pseudopolis Yard. There was a story in this lot and they were determined to get to The Truth of the matter.

Sergeant Colon occupied the front desk and he had been the first Watch officer to impede their progress. The tableau was a familiar one to all three of them.

William tapped his notebook against his left hand. He and Sacharissa exchanged an exasperated glance.

Sergeant Angua appeared, stepping elegantly down the stairs. She took one look at the tableau occupied by William and Fred, drew the correct conclusion and then blocked the entrance to the cells. 

William cursed his poor luck. Colon had almost given in under an onslaught of De Worde word chopping and obscure obstruction of the truth. William had just about convinced Colon that Mr Vimes had allowed William and Sacharissa to come into the watch house and assist with the investigations. It was only one small step from there to be allowed access to the prisoners, and then that woman had come down the stairs and suddenly he had lost all the ground he had claimed from Fred.

"The city wants to know…" William started.

"I don't think so," Angua said softly. It was a voice with a sub sonic rumble that could only signal spine-numbing terror if a carrnivore should happen to be the kind of animal that made it. Just as well it came from some one as physically harmless in appearance as Angua, William thought. Except there was the chain mail she was wearing. She didn't wear a sword. Affirmative action? He hardly thought so. Her bearing was much too predatory for that. There was a rumour that the watch employed a werewolf. Once upon a time William had suspected Nobby, but just lately he had shifted the focus of his suspicion.

"I need to follow up," William persisted. "The article in the Times left so much unanswered. 

"It said altogether too much," Angua replied laconically.

"We need to tie up those loose ends." 

"Lord Downey and his minions have been snooping around have they?" Angua retorted. Perhaps a sword wasn't necessary. The words 'biting sarcasm' came to mind. And edged smile.

"Well, yes, if you must know," William conceded.

"Asking you about the article on the fight in the Drum?" Edged? William asked himself. Perhaps vulpine was closer to the truth.

"Well, yes." William figured if he could keep her talking there was a chance that he might be able to guide the conversation his way. It worked so often it was worth trying every time. 

Angua folded her arms under her breastplate. "Do you know what a gonne is Mr De Worde?"

He tested the word with his mouth, silently. He even spelt it correctly. "No I can't say that I do," he conceded.

"Well the members of the watch know just what it is, and the assassins guild do as well. We'd like to be sure that the alchemists and the cunning artificers don't ever find out. Does that make any sense to you?"

Way too much for William's comfort. "Can I quote you on that?" he said, but in reality his mind was racing. Whatever a gonne was it was the key to this situation.

"So long as you attribute the quote to Sir Samuel Vimes," Angua replied. Her smile widened. Were those teeth pointed? William wasn't sure, and that was a worry in itself.

"Ah then perhaps not," he decided.

"Now if you don't mind Mr De Worde. I think you and I are done here."

*

Saccharissa was once a demure, innocent girl. She had worked in her fathers printing business, helping him with the engraving so that he could print things for people who had a need for paper copies of things. They made a living, they were not in danger of getting rich, but they got by.

Then she met William De Worde, and while he was not the most boisterous of rabble-rousers he was something far worse, he was a terrier with a Uzi. His weapons were the pen and the ink and the printing press. 

The characteristics that defined William De Wordee was the sort of combination that was necessary to release the inner Saccharissa, the one that had been sitting on the sidelines screaming, "Go for it!" and "What are ya, yellow?" and other priceless motivating mantras.

Now, after only a few months together, they made a matched set. He was the man who not only saved the Patrician from the most recent plot brought against him, but had stood up to his own father at the same time. Sometimes the latter is much more difficult than the former. 

She had been one of the tools that had been instrumental in his triumph. She did not have the same embodied personal demons to overcome. Her demons were far more ephemeral, being the perception and the inertia of an entire society in which she was raised, one where she was constrained into a role that was patently unsuited to her personality, simply by an accident of gender. It was a far more competent villain to battle than the mere presence of a difficult father image.

William and Sacharissa waited on the corner, just outside the Pseudopolis Yard entrance and looked back up the steps at the now closed front door. "I'll follow them," she offered.

William nodded. It mirrored his thinking. "I'll send Otto along. I think we might need pictures."

Saccharrisa nodded and left him so she could hide in the shadow of the building. William set off in the direction of the Times' offices. He had a story to uncover and shadows to cast aside with the brilliant glare of The Truth.


	7. Chapter 7

Since the stargate's discovery in an archaeological dig hidden away in the back blocks of Egypt, the US government had secreted it beneath the Chyanne Mountains, hiding it from the world's prying eyes by burying it in a secured military compound. 

Samatha Carter's booted feet clanked on the surface of the metal ramp as she walked upward. She took one grim look over her shoulder, taking in the sight of the overhead mission control centre, the cavernous excavation in which the entire facility was housed and the team of armed marines that lined both sides of the entry ramp.

The iris that protected the US stargate installation from unauthorised entry (particularly from that unwelcome bunch of parasites that were responsible for placing the thing in Egypt in the first place), spiralled open like a well oiled machine. It made a noise like some-one sharpening knives on an oilstone. 

Carter turned back to face the stargate, and so doing he looked directly into the optical cloak that protected them for the violent storm of radiation that would otherwise be emitted from the event horizon inherent in the stargate's wormhole. The gate was about five metres in diameter, apparently carved in rock with machine tolerances. Symbols have been engraved into the circumference of the giant toroidal piece of stonemasonry and research by Egyptologists had resulted in a rough decoding system for establishing what those addresses represented. Ahead of her was a visually disturbing damper/interface that was modulated from within the wormhole portal so that it cloaked the event horizon. It looked like some one had suspended the surface of a swimming pool in the vertical plane, and then the bastards had neglected to tell the water that it should run away and sulk (like it would have done if it had really been water). 

There was no point in looking at it any more, she had looked at it dozens of times before and it always looked the same.

Carter stepped through the stargate portal. It is difficult to explain what she endured during the next few seconds. The passage through the gate seemed to last for eternity (and just might have done, if the latest research into the stargate phenomenon is correct. Physicists' have begun to show an unfortunate tendency to border on metaphysics in their dabbling-s nowadays. I mean, do you really think that a sub-atomic particle has 'charm'. Seriously, that is one of the characteristics that modern subatomic particle physicists have used to describe the behaviour of particles, go figure). 

Carter endured a gut wrenching ride like some sadistic bastard had tacked the Universe's worst roller coaster design onto the far side of the portal. It was accompanied by a visual track that was intended to heighten the impression that one was about to look at one's breakfast again really soon. Then Carter appeared somewhere else in space-time, only a few moments (or eternities, depending on your scholastic allegiances) later. The trans-spatial ride was still a wild trip even after all these years spent crossing the portal on his way to distant places where she got to meet lots of exotic people and sometimes managed to get back in one piece without shooting any of them. 

So it was that on the discworld, the cloak of shimmering, distorted space-time that floated in the maw of the stargate parted and Samantha Carter stepped through. The degree to which Carter was physically attractive was something upon which Jack O'Neill had wasted a considerable amount of thought, despite her blonde hair being cut relatively short and her unfortunate dress sense. She has a PhD in physics but you could never tell the extent of her education or intelligence from an examination of her outfit or her demeanour. Carter was a handsome woman, still somewhere in the early phases of the transition from young to the 'uncertain age' of female matriarchal hierarchy. 

When she stepped through the gate she struggled a little because she was overloaded with gear. She carried a gun; she had a knife and grenades on the webbing around her waist. Her helmet crushed her hair into a shaggy fringe that protruded around the edges. Her combat fatigues mould themselves to a shape that was worth a second look, especially if you like them with metallic objects of malevolent intent clipped and stashed all over her person. 

Hey, there are some guys out there who… Never mind that, this is not one of those stories.

She wore a distracted expression, which told the world - or the disc - that she was lost in her thoughts - none of which were happy. Thing were not gong well on this mission. She had found things out that made her very concerned, thing that suggested most of her knowledge of physics was close to useless here and to top it off, the rest of her team had gone missing. It wasn't as though that was such an unusual experience. Hardly a mission went by without at least one of them going missing. In fact they were frequently killed in the line of duty, but it was rarely permanent. You got used to that sort of thing after a while.

But for some reason she though this time it was different. She had tried for a couple of hours to contact the rest of the SG-1 team, with no success. Either they were underground, where their radio's were out of reach, or they were in trouble. They were usually pretty good when it came to informing her about being out of range or whatever. This time there was just the sudden cut off of communications, and when that happened it was usually bad. 

Left on her own devices she had reached a command decision, and she had dialled home and gone back to report the situation. General Hammond had put a team on stand-by. It was all he was prepared to do until the nature of the threat became clearer or things happened and she could report in more detail. So Carter had come back to the discworld to wait for O'Neill and team to report back in. If she wasn't back at SGC in a couple of hours, then they were coming through. 

And upon her return to the disc, she discovered that she was not alone in her little investigative area.

Two men dressed in gaudy cloaks awaited her arrival. At first glance she was put in mind of a hirsute and drag-dressed version of Laurel and Hardy. Nothing that happened afterward changed her initial opinion. Carter and the newcomers eyed each other off carefully.

As soon as the gate showed signs of life again, Ponder Stibbons and Mustrum Ridcully had tensed in anticipation of battle with tentacled monsters from the dungeon dimensions. They were poised with staffs raised and the first spell they could come up with under the circumstances, half uttered. 

Then Carter stepped out of the event horizon.

They swallowed their words with an effort. After all, though the denizens of the dungeon dimensions often took on the form of beautiful young women, they tended not to be armed to the teeth with hardware in the way that this one appeared to. They were usually dressed more alluringly. There was none of this camouflage and combat gear for them. In the dungeon dimensions tentacles worked best. 

Ponder Stibbons looked at Mustrum Ridcully as though asking, 'what do we do now?' 

Women in chain mail were rare enough, but this? She had more metal hanging off her than an infantry regiment.

"Who are you?" Samantha Carter asked.

*

Sam Vimes led Captain Carrot, Detritus and Jack O'Neill into the Patrician's palace. They wandered through the area being worked by Cheri in her crime scene investigation and then they squeezed into the secret passageway. Detritus managed to get through the doorway by the expedient of creating a new one. While they stepped lightly along the corridor, carefully dodging a thousand blades and blunt instruments that made up the selection of ironmongery that was now on display, O'Neill glanced at a few of them as though they were old friends. From the corner of his eye, Vimes watched O'Neill's reactions, noted the way he inspected the display of weaponry. He had obviously seen it all during his team's march through the hallway a little earlier.

"Look familiar does it?" Vimes asked.

"Of course," O'Neill answered. He stepped nonchalantly around a morning star and placed his hands into his pockets.

"That office back there," Vimes pointed over his shoulder, "belonged to the Patrician. He's gone missing."

"Oh," commented O'Neill.

"Yes. Oh. You came in, dodged this lot, marched into the Patrician's office and… What?"

"Found it empty and kept going."

"Normally, I'd have to say your story was a pack of lies," Vimes told O'Neill, "but this is the discworld after all, and, damn but some weird stuff goes down here. Coming to visit from another star is probably the least implausible story I've heard over the years. But there's still the missing Patrician. Either you were responsible or you're my best witness. Which?"

"I wish I could help" O'Neill shrugged. "This is all just bizarre."

"The guy's you're going to meet are the experts at bizarre. I'm just a humble policeman. I deal in facts and people."

"Well, yeah you got that right, you've got the bizarre market cornered" O'Neill said and eyed Detritus off. 

For his part, Detritus was getting a bit fed up with the attention. It was as though the guy had never seen a troll before.

"You claim you didn't create the ring, gate whatever it is?" Vimes continued.

"That's right. We just came to investigate. Offer the hand of peace."

"We've had this discussion."

O'Neill stooped to push a cross bow aside. It would have delivered a nasty bolt at a little below the waist level of most men. O'Neill had winced when he saw it the first time and did so again this second time. The very thought…

Vimes was still speaking. "It would have been nice if the thing in there had been created by the Wizards. Them I can deal with. They might break through to the dungeon dimensions occasionally, but at least they look after their own problems. This thing," he said and ushered O'Neill through the door and into Leonard De Quirm's study/cell, "is a whole new kettle of fish as far as this place is concerned. You sure you don't have any idea who put it here?"

O'Neill stopped beside Vimes. The two of them filled the doorway. There was no need to follow Vimes' gesture. O'Neill was comfortably familiar with the thing that filled the far half of the room. 

"None whatsoever," O'Neill said. "It's what we came through to find out." 

Vimes shook his head ruefully. He had the feeling he was being lied to. Not the whole story, just that last statement.

"Figured it might be something like that," Vimes said with his usual sardonic edge. He had already figured that O'Neill was of the genus 'guard' in one of it's otherworldly manifestations. The clues were all there. He didn't have the furtive spy-type approach to him everywhere he looked and everything he said and did. Vimes had actually begun to warm to the man. There was obviously a kindred spirit in there.

It was just such a pity about the gonnes. That was the truly scary aspect of O'Neill's team's appearance. It said something bad about the sort of things O'Neill's team had to guard his city against. Whatever it was that they encountered out there, the guards who watched out for it needed to carry gonnes and that suggested it was a really bad thing for the discworld to have encountered. The Patrician's disappearance made it all the worse.

"We'll help you in every way we can to get the Patrician back," O'Neill offered.

Vimes nodded. Sometime during the last few minutes O'Neill had gone from prisoner to case consultant. Carrot noted the change with interest. The similarity between Vimes and O'Neill had not escaped him.

Regarding the stargate they encountered a trio of people. Two of them were unfamiliar to O'Neill. The third was one he wanted to get more familiar with if the fraternisation regulations of the SGC ever relaxed.

"Hi Sam," O'Neill said as soon as he passed through the doorway. "I was wondering where you had gotten to."

"Thank god you're back," Carter replied. "When you didn't report in, I went back through to SGC. You were gone for such a long time."

Vimes followed O'Neill's line of sight and caught sight of the woman who was waiting beside the two Wizards. For some reason he was put in mind of his own Sergeant Angua. It probably wasn't the military uniform, or the blonde good looks or anything; it was more likely the look of restrained motion. A posture that said, as soon as no one is looking, I'm out of here.

"Another of yours," Vimes said to O'Neill. "I take it."

"Yep."

"How many more of you are out there, blundering around in my town."

O'Neill raised one laconic eyebrow. "That's all of them accounted for now."

"You're sure now? You wouldn't want to count them again to make sure?"

"No. I'm pretty sure that's all of them accounted for now."

Vimes looked him over for a minute. O'Neill remained poker faced. "Then perhaps I should introduce you to the wizards," Vimes finished.

*

Daniel Jackson marched along the Tudor lined streets on Ankh Morpork beside Teal'c. They weren't bound in any way and there appeared to be no physical reason for them to walk along the pavement as though they were prisoners, except there remained this imposing presence that strolled along behind them. She looked pleasant enough, but there was always this underlying suspicion that there was something real underpinned her vulpine smile.

Since their last turn, Jackson had found himself in familiar territory. SG-1 had walked these streets before their fateful encounter in the Mended Drum. He had a horrible idea that he knew where they were being taken. And he wasn't happy at the implications.

Angua directed them around a corner. Teal'c and Jackson went to round it and almost tripped over… something coming the other way.

Jackson took a second look to be sure of what it might be.

It looked like a fur-ball that embodied the essences extracted from most of the world's bad smells, all distilled together into one compact package. It stepped into their path. Jackson blinked. It moved. It was still alive… whatever it was. Jackson figured it might once have been a dog. 

Gaspode was the dog's name and contrary to most people's perceptions on the matter, Gaspode could think and speak. Both were unusual skills for a dog and owed a great deal to his early years, which were spent hiding in the Unseen University. Magic contaminates. It contaminates land and it contaminates other things. Animals for instance.

Just when Jackson thought it might have been safe to move forward, a larger ball of olfactory assault appeared behind the first and proved that the first was only a prelude, an entrée, nothing more than a taster or a teaser, a lead in before the main event.

Teal'c turned to face the apparition and gagged. 

Jackson turned as well, but his nose wanted to go somewhere else and fought for control of his neck. His first thought upon encountering it was that whatever it was, it must have been formed from upright ambulatory sewerage sludge, wrapped in a threadbare coat and cloaked in mind-blowing assault of olfactory artistry that it had a virtual life of it's own. Daniel Jackson knew a lot of words and was always charitable in his first impressions, but even he was running out of adjectives and synonyms for awful.

"Millennium hand and shrimp," the apparition croaked. Foul Old Ron's breath added a new depth to the entire olfactory experience. It entered Daniel's nose like an assault by a SWAT team and took his brain prisoner. 

When he recovered from his attempts to cough the smell back up and take his contaminated lungs with it, Jackson could draw a few conclusions. OK, we're dealing with a male here, Jackson concluded. Human? He wasn't sure. He had one question answered but he had another few to get through before he could reach a conclusion on that one. "Hi gorgeous," the apparition continued, much more lucidly than it had been in it's opening remarks. 

Jackson's mind wouldn't go near the idea that the lucid second sentence seemed to come from a slightly different direction. Closer to the ground and a few feet in front of where the other, taller, dirt ball stood.

Angua wisely stepped back slightly. 

Daniel took an almost perverse pleasure in the utterly disgusting nature of his immersion in the entire olfactory experience. The smell clung like a malevolent cloud and the advance storm troopers that shot through his nostrils threatened to dissolve his brain.

"What do you want Gaspode?" Angua asked from a position behind Jackson and Teal'c. Her attention was on the dog rather than the man behind it.

Beside Jackson, Teal'c took defensive action. Both eyebrows rose. Teal'c wisely stepped sideways and watched the by-play between Angua and Foul Old Ron from a slight distance, hiding behind an invisible biological buffer of a few metres. The breeze shifted. He stepped back another metre to further avoid savouring the experience any more than he had to. 

"Buggerit," the grotesque pile of biological detritus continued. "Saw them going into the Drum, saw the whole millennium thing."

"Who?" Angua asked guardedly, not wishing to give away the status of the prisoners. It was always a good thing to remain tight-lipped on those matters. Especially so in situations where politics had so much to do with things.

"The guys with the gonne."

"With the what?" Angua asked.

"You trying to lie to a dog?"

Angua shrugged. Eloquently, in Jackson's opinion.

"Did you take a good enough sniff to be able to describe them to us?" Angua asked. Hoping to divert attention. Gaspode was altogether too political for his own good sometimes.

"Do I look bloody stupid?" He asked in return. "Buggerit." 

He needed an effort, but Daniel managed not to speak. It would have meant drawing breath and he wasn't sure that would be advisable. 

Foul Old Ron coughed a great hacking phlegmy bark that set off a whole fresh round of activity among the flees and moths that floated before Jackson's eyes. Jackson had an overwhelming urge to sneeze. He was sure a doctor could catalogued a whole medical dictionary full of diseases and obscure poisons from the air he was breathing, most of which he couldn't even pronounce, let alone know their effects. 

The apparition recovered, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, making one or the other dirtier than it had been. Jackson was uncertain which. "There was three of them though," he continued. "Buggerit."

"We know," Angua told him.

"Just though you might like to know that there was another one. Favour for an old friend."

Angua shuddered. "Mr Vimes has him as well."

"OK, then," Gaspode agreed.

Jackson sneezed, and then sneezed again. They were great hacking, racking cracking sneezes that threaten to strain his grey matter through his sinus cavity and drop his brain on the pavement.

"Get away yer germ-y bastard," the apparition said. 

Foul Old Ron, and his thinking dog Gaspode, slunk back around the corner.

The smell made a more leisurely exit as though it had a life of it's own. There was a growing school of thought in Ankh Morpork that suggested his smell had life of it's own so naratively it's possible to make that statement.

Gaspode reappeared. "Going to tag along," he told Angua.

Dog's can't talk, Jackson told himself and actually believed it. People are funny like that.

*

Vimes pushed the plans for a set-type-by-the-action-of-the-fingers-so-that-words-could-be-printed-on-the-page machine onto the floor and sat on the desk where the plans had been. He waved at Ponder Stibbons and Mistrum Ridcully and introduced them to Jack O'Neill.

"Have you drawn any conclusions?" Vimes asked the wizards.

"Dungeon dimensions," Stibbons said.

"Nothing concrete," Ridcully corrected. "Although that looks to be a genuine possibility."

"These people claim it's a made thing," Vimes said and gestured toward O'Neill. "You have anything to say to the gathering?" Vimes asked O'Neill.

O'Neill turned to Samantha Carter instead. "Have you been able to draw any new conclusions yet?" he asked.

"Nothing concrete," She said. She frowned. "There's not enough back up to the design anywhere among this lot." She gestured in such a way as to encompass the piles of paper scattered about the room. "You know what you would expect, research notes, references to other works, that sort of thing. There's just none of that here; nothing. The plans just appeared on the paper, complete, and then it was built."

O'Neill didn't like the sound of that. "So, what does that mean to us?"

"The plans have to have come from a Goa'uld," Carter said earnestly. "The guy who invented it must have been either working with a Goa'uld, or at least a Jaffa."

"So they're here then?"

"Looks that way."

"If you don't mind," Vimes reminded O'Neill of the reason that they had come to the room in the first place. "You want to explain what that means to us? And how that might relate to the Patrician's disappearance."

Across the other side of the room from them, the two wizards had abandoned the conversation. Ridcully was not happy with the way that woman was sprouting the sort of stuff that he normally expected to come from Stibbons' mouth. The wizards had to regain lost ground in the explanation of unknown phenomena stakes and there was only one way to do that. When the rest of the conversation went on, he dragged Stibbons aside and they were now lost in their examination of the stargate. The pair crouched between the gate mechanism and the wall, trying to read the runes on the far side of the thing. They were not having much luck.

Carter wandered away from O'Neill so she could re-join the wizards. She was hoping for a little enlightenment. Stibbons had talked sense. She might be able to get a few clues from him.

O'Neill leant against the opposite wall, close by where Vimes waited to speak with him. Carrot and Detritus stood either side of O'Neill like good palace guards. O'Neill had a really bad feeling about the presence of Goa'uld and the Patrician's disappearance. A really bad feeling. He dragged his attention back to what Vimes was saying with a huge effort.

"Here's what I know," Vimes said and chewed the end of his cigar. It had gone out and he wanted to light it, but he had no dragon, and he was reluctant to strike a match on Detritus again. "Lord Vetenari was last seen in his office yesterday. His secretary brought him a report from our ambassador in Sto Helit. I'm not sure what was in it, and the secretary is no help, because the thing was in code." Vimes waved a sheet of paper at O'Neill. "This came through the clax a few minutes later," Vimes continued. "It appeared to be in the same code, so the Secretary brought it through to Vetenari in a rush, only to find his office empty.

"Ordinarily the fact that Vetinari vanished without a trace would be a cause for concern, because every other time it's happened in the past, there was something sinister going on. Since things have become more balanced, most of the Guild leaders go to a great deal of trouble to make sure that this sort of thing doesn't happen again. They like the stability. So now, when he disappears again, I start to look really hard for outside agencies, those people who don't know what the hell is going on in this town or understand how the system works. They're the ones I look at first."

Vimes jabbed the stubs of his cigar in O'Neill's direction. "Imagine my reaction when I find you in town. You fit the bill exactly. Armed, trained and from out of town. I just have to be suspicious. And then you go and tell me half a story. Give me bits. Not any more. I want the full story mister. Spit it all out."

He paused, waiting for O'Neill's comments.

"Oh, yes!" said Samantha Carter. Her fist punched at thin air. She held something in her hand; it looked like a neatly bundled sheaf of paper.

O'Neill looked from Vimes to the stargate. "You figure anything out there Sam?" 

"Yes," said Samuel Vimes.

"Sorry," said Samantha Carter. "Who were you…?"

"I've been telling you what…" began Samuel Vimes. "Oh, perhaps we should use surnames."

"Maybe this is it," O'Neill told Vimes and then gestured for Carter to go on. "Maybe the answer to what happened here is in what Carter is about to tell us. You got something useful Sam?"

Both Sams blinked.

Cater figured it out first. She answered slowly, punctuating each work with a glance into the notes she held in her hand. "An enormous amount sir," Carter said. "I think." She thumbed through more of the sheets, one after another, reading pieces here and there, sampling really. "There's more of the drawings for the construction of the machine, but there's also a dissertation on the theory of wormhole travel and even an operators manual. Oh, and the operators manual has the most amazing sketched in the margin. When ever you look at it your sure the eyes follow you around the room. I have to take all this back to base. That's where I was before, when I first figured out that the Goa'uld had to have been here. I tried to contact you sir, but you didn't answer your radio."

"Ah that would be because we were unconscious and locked in the cells," O'Neill said. 

"Sorry about that sir," Carrot said. "We weren't to know."

"Not to worry, happens all the time in this job," O'Neill flipped him a vague wave and then returned to Carter. "You said the Goa'uld are here…?"

"No we really are sorry," Carrot apologised again.

"It's fine. Like I said, happens all the time in this job," O'Neill focussed on Carter. "Does that book prove or disprove that the Goa'uld are here?"

"Prove, I would say."

O'Neill nodded slowly. "You can read the book?" he asked.

"Oh… yeah… Right… It's in reversed English."

"Not hieroglyphics?"

"Well… No."

"Doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't them."

"I guess not."

"You're saying that some one here on the discworld created this thing," Vimes concluded. "But that they had help. Who are these Goa'uld? You tell me that and the rest of what I need to find out, who, why and where they took Vetenari. Then we can act. These Goa'uld, they are the same aliens that you mentioned earlier?"

O'Neill didn't want to think about what it could mean if the Goa'uld had taken the Patrician. They had seen stuff like that way too often in the past.

He never had the chance to answer Vimes' question because the discussion broke off when footsteps sounded in the hallway.

Angua stepped through the door, followed shortly afterward by Daniel Jackson and Teal'c. A scruffy little terrier like object followed them through and hung around Angua's feet. She shaped to kick at it once and it dodged skilfully.

"I see you found Gaspode," Carrot commented to Angua. She grimaced in reply.

"I wondered what that smell was," Vimes said.

'Woof, bloody woof woof," Gaspode said.

Everyone knows that dogs don't talk so they all ignored the second word. Vimes puzzled over the fact that the little dog appeared to speak the bark, rather than bark it out. He didn't let the problem use up much of his time. It was puzzling though.

"So where do these things normally come from?" Vimes asked. He pointed at the Stargate. It was a redundant gesture; everyone knew what 'thing' he was referring to.

"The Gou'ld leave the things lying around," O'Neill said. "The galaxy is full of the bloody things."

"The who?" Angua asked. 

"Show her Teal'c," O'Neill said and waved the Jaffa over.


	8. Chapter 8

"I don't see how this thing can possibly work," Ponder Stibbons told Mustrum Ridcully. He pointed at the stargate which steadfastle refused to be intimidated by the wizard's gesture. "It doesn't seem to tap into the local thaumalogical field at all." Ponder removed his hat and scratched at the straggly mane that passed for his hair. "I can't see how something so obviously eldritch can operate without at least some sort of power source."

After a few years overseeing their activities - and cringing whenever their budget came up for review - Ridcully was well down the track toward learning how to deal with Stibbons and his team of high powered thinkers. It involved letting them come to him. It was a bit like teasing a trout. If he played dumb enough, they eventually had to start talking sense. It was a skill they had to learn if they wanted to continue getting the resources they used up at such an enormous rate.

"The alchemists are always playing with a thing they call chemical energy," Ridcully suggested.

Ponder was taken aback by the validity of the statement - it was not like Mustrum Ridcully to make suggestions like that, not like him at all - but he rallied as soon as the obvious fallacy presented itself to him. 

For all that chemical energy was obviously insufficient to power a device like the one in front of them, it took a surprisingly long time for Ponder to come up with the counter argument. "That's just variations on fire," said Ponder finally. "It wouldn't have anything like enough energy to power this thing. I mean look at it."

Ridcully would rather not, if you don't mind.

"Forest fires seem to have a great deal of energy," Ridcully pointed out reasonably.

Ponder took a moment to consider that concept. "This seems to use energy in the same sort of proportions as a lightening strike," he concluded.

That smacked too close to the whole 'God' thing for Ridcully's taste. If someone really was toying with the powers of the gods then there might be hell to pay when the bill came due. Literally. 

It was a vain hope, especially so if they were mention by name, to even consider out loud the possibility that the denizens of Dunmanifestin might have had a hand in this thing's creation. Ridcully hoped they weren't watching them at this very moment and wondering how to best stuff up the lives of all concerned. He knew it was a vain hope the moment the idea occurred to him.

Ridcully shuddered at the thought.

If they didn't get this thing under control soon, it might be like the one time a sourcerer got loose on the discworld. It had been a dark day in the disc's history, a dark day indeed. Back then Ridcully was living up in the mountains, hunting birds and snaring trout, and he had missed most of the real action. But he had heard all about it over many a large lunch. No one had escaped the wrath or consequences - except for Rincewind, nothing ever seemed to stick to Rincewind. But everyone else who had been part of the Unseen University had taken a thaumalogical beating in the aftermath.

He said as much to Stibbons, who did not respond. Which was strange, Ponder Stibbons never let a theoretical thaumalogical conversational opening rest. Like many of the high energy magic team Ponder was not all that well acquainted with the notion of a rhetorical question and often found himself saying things to people and then enduring the most extraordinary blank expressions in reply.

Ridcully looked up just in time to see Ponder's eyes flick open wide, as though the lids were loaded with springs.

"Oh my God," Ponder Stibbons cried. "It's come from the dungeon dimensions. It's been cloaking itself as a man and now the tentacles are coming out…" The rest was muffled by his arm that suddenly encased his head and it appeared to be trying desperately to burrow it's way into Ponder's shoulders.

Ridcully reacted quickly. He had been through this before; confrontation with the dungeon dimensions was old hat now. He was a veteran of several recent campaigns and knew exactly what was required. He raised his staff and uttered the first spell that came to mind.

There was a blinding flash of octarine light. It came from the tip of Ridcully's staff.

Where once he had been standing beside Jack O'Neill, Teal'c disappeared with a puff of air. There was just a gentle pop and then he was gone.

*

Jack O'Neill had been through this before; confrontation with staff wielding alien monstrosities was old hat now. He was a veteran of more campaigns against the Goa'uld than he cared to remember. He was responsible for removing Ahman Ra from Abedos. He was the bane of Apophos' existence. For years he had survived the trials and tribulations of life in the Stargate command because he reacted quickly and occasionally correctly.

He slapped at his holster with his right hand, but of course that was empty. He remembered belatedly that his gonne - no that was gun - was still sitting in Commander Vimes office. 

He was incorrect in that assumption as well, but the Jack O'Neill couldn't possibly have known what had happened to his guns. When last O'Neill had last seen his guns they had been sitting on the desk alongside the one that Daniel Jackson had been assigned by that bastard quartermaster back at SGC, but not any more. Now Corporal Nobby Nobbs was looking after it for them. It just wouldn't do to leave something like that just lying around where anyone could just pick it up and steal it. Oh no. Nobby was looking after it for them, being the good citizen that he is.

With the use of his own gun out of the question, O'Neill had to think quickly. It was time for plan B. He dived across the table that separated him from Samantha Carter, scattering the half-finished sketches of a rose that caught the light just so, and the plans for a horseless carriage powered by burning hydrocarbon. They drifted onto the floor to join the plans for-the-machine-for-setting-type-by-the-action-of-fingers-against-keys. 

O'Neill slid across the desk, balanced on his hip, poised and ready for action, and then he fell off the edge.

O'Neill rolled when he dropped off the desktop and bounced to his feet. He snatched the gun from Samantha Carter's holster. "Die you Goa'uld scum," he cried and squeezed the trigger. 

Nothing happened.

He cursed, released the safety and squeezed the trigger again. 

Sort of under his control, the gun released a storm of lead particles. The cataclysmic lead storm was accompanied by the sort of rapid fire banging that suggested deafness was a valid long-term prognosis to anyone who could still hear. The room was filled with the reek of burnt cordite that only a US Military issue fully automatic sub-machine gun could manage. Spent cartridges rattled to the floor. A few of them bounced off Samantha and Ponder Stibbons. They were still hot and they burnt like hell.

"Hey," Samantha cried.

No one could hear her and no one was listening anyway.

Every one of the members of the City Watch dived behind something that had been designed by Leonard De Quirm to make life easier for everyday man. For the moment they served a second purpose, they protected every man troll and werewolf from taking a hit from a lead pellet. The watch personnel all knew from experience what a gonne was capable of and this one was an order of magnitude worse than even their vivid imaginings. Their earlier experience had been one shot at a time, not this firestorm. 

Stibbons thought quickest of all. He hid behind Detritus.

A couple of spent shells bounced off the troll and landed harmlessly on the floor. "Dat's sort of annoying," commented the Troll, three beats behind the drummer as usual.

For all the projectiles, smoke, noise and smell that discharged from the gun, Ridcully was too quick for that little ploy of O'Neill's to be even partway successful. The Arch Chancellor dived head long over the windowsill and out of the room, moving remarkably quickly for a man of his age, stature and girth. His flight was followed by the tiny shrapnel and splinter cloud that had once been the aerates-milk-to-make-frothy-coffee-machine, which had taken the brunt of O'Neill's enthusiasm.

"Get the frog," Ridcully yelled to Stibbons before he dashed across the garden.

*

Samantha Carter wasn't hanging around. She might have been slow to react when the threat first appeared, but that all changed as soon as Jack O'Neill had responded to the threat posed by the Goa'uld. She had reacted very quickly then. Her job in this fracas was clear, she had to get back to SGC as quickly as possible and let them know what was going on over here. Lucky she was the one with the DialHomeDevice. But in the meantime it was important that she get through the next few minutes unscathed, so she could use it.

She had seen Teal'c disappear, wiped out by a blast from that staff. That sort of thing makes you aware of the important issues.

All of her suspicions about this place and the creators of this new gate had been proven. Her first job was to spread the word. Before she could do that though, it was important to dodge those guys with the wormy thing in side them until she had a means to defend herself and protect the DHD. It was vitally important that those guys didn't get hold of it. The last thing the SGC needed was giving the Goa'uld a means to get through Earth's gate.

She had seen O'Neill take the shot at the Jaffa. That was great, but his taking he gun for it had meant she was unarmed now when she needed to get out of this place. Jack could sort that immediate threat from the Goa'uld they had identified, she knew that. In a way that was good that he had the gun because he was the best shot among them and he wasn't afraid to use it - but it left her unarmed. She had to do something else, something to identify how many more Goa'uld might be in this place. 

Keeping out of trouble, preferably somewhere where the Goa'uld weren't, was the answer in the short term. 

She reached a decision.

She could always find a way back to the gate later, after she had a chance to do a spot of planning.

For the moment she had to wait until the dust smoke and screaming cleared, and then get back to SGC. She wasn't hanging around here, where the Goa'uld were out in the open while she waited for that to happen though. She could get hurt big time dong something like that. 

She dived through the door and found herself in the corridor filled with dangling weapons.

"Oh," she said in a tiny awed voice, and then she skidded to a halt. "Dear."

She was going to have to tread very carefully if she was going to avoid getting a nasty injury from this lot.

*

The noise had stopped. Ponder Stibbons suspected it might be safe to come out now. There was really only one way to find out for sure. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. He crawled out from behind the bulk that was Detritus and blinked a couple of times at the carnage that spread before him. 

His ears were ringing and his eyes were watering. The smoke had started to clear and he could see that the disc was still where he had left it moments earlier. 

Ridcully was nowhere to be seen.

He had a vague recollection of being told to do something with a frog. He just wasn't sure what he was supposed to do with it, exactly. It was baffling.

Then he saw something move. It was near the floor and it was green. Ponder had enough clues. He knew what he had to do in the short term.

*

Commander Vimes pushed out from behind the remains of what had once been Havelock Vetenary's favourite frothy coffee machine and looked carefully around the room and it's wreckage. He was wondering what sort of mechanism allowed a gonne to do that, fire repeatedly like that, and was suddenly desperate to make sure the cunning artificers never got hold of that idea. A gonne with a repeating mechanism like that could do as much damage as Detritus' siege weapon, and be portable enough to carry around by a human. That was an awful combination. Humans just couldn't be trusted with a thing like that.

And of course there was the Jack O'Neill situation. Vimes understood perfectly the desire to put great bloody holes in Mustrum Ridcully, but it was another thing to actually try doing it. The man must be mad.

And to think that Vimes had started to like the man. 

There was only one thing for it. They had to stop him before he actually followed through with his first attempt at University Management succession.

But as soon as the decision to take action was made, it was already too late.

*

O'Neill leapt across the room in the direction where he had last seen the jaffa, scattering drawings and half-constructed implements that blocked his path as he went. For a moment he thought he saw the creature hiding behind the table, but instead it had managed to get out through the window. 

O'Neill said something that would require censoring.

He made for the wall by the side of the window, and waited there with his back to the wall long enough to be hopeful that he wasn't about to take a bolt the way Teal'c had. He chanced one quick glance into the garden, gun aimed and ready.

He thought he saw a purple flash in the garden and let off another burst. 

Everyone still left in Leonard De Quirm's study dived back behind whatever cover they had used during O'Neill's previous barrage. 

The body in the garden exploded in a cloud of feathers.

"Damn," O'Neill said from the cover provided by the wall of De Quirm's study wall. "Missed."

"Good," Ridcully said from the cover of a large tree. "Missed."

The bloody thing that used to be Henrietta the Hen said nothing. Her feathers floated in the wind.

*

Ponder Stibbons crawled out from behind Detritus again, and then made his way across the floor, threading his way through the forest of table legs and scattered paper. He remembered what Mustrum Ridcully had demanded of him in that last second before dashing into the garden. 

His job was to catch the frog, the one who had been that denizen from the dungeon dimensions, before it changed back.

If circumstances had been a little less pressing, and events around him moving at a slower pace, he might have pondered the question of why the thing had been so easy to transform. It wasn't as though magic had been all that effective on things from the dungeon dimension in the fracas that followed the last time one of them burst through to the discworld. But for now he was just thankful for the opportunity to continue to make his way in the world.

Ahead of him he saw something green.

His hearing was obviously returning. He heard the thing in front of him croak. His target was acquired, it was time to act.

He made a diving grab for the frog. The hand supporting most of his weight was leaning on a piece of paper. When he pushed off, the paper went backwards as fast as Ponder went forward.

Most of him went forward rather. Part of his upper body went down instead.

The frog, for its part, watched his approach and hopped away at the last possible moment. This is consistent with the narrative requirement that insisted on maximising the amount of embarrassment experienced by poor Ponder Stibbons. 

Ponder slid across the floor, leaning heavily on his face. He completed the manoeuvre by collided head first with the leg of a table.

He groaned and rubbed the top of his head, which he had just used to shift the table and all of it's contents several centimetres.

Teal'c watched Ponder's plight for a moment, croaked once derisively and then hopped again, hiding behind a suction-device-to-help-lift-all-those-small-pieces-of-rubbish-off-the-floor machine. 

That looked like a wonderful vantage point from which to watch the drama unfold.

*

A seven-foot tall skeleton, wearing a midnight black robe, stood beside a giant white horse. A careful look at that robe would note that it wasn't fashioned from midnight coloured cloth, oh no. It was fashioned from midnight itself. No ensemble of that kind is complete without the wicked implement of doom, in whatever shape it may take. In this instance it was a scythe with the most wicked cutting edge. The handle of that reaping tool was clutched in one boy hand with a death's grip.

A closer look at the horse might also be revealing, assuming we could actually see in that dimension between instants of time where the apparition 'lived'. The horse looked like a flesh and blood thoroughbred. And the illusion would have been excellent if the horse happened to be standing on the ground. It was standing near the ground, not on it. It's placement was a little inaccurate, that was all. After travelling so far, a minor navigation error - it was only a couple of centimetres after all - might be forgivable.

A closer look again would reveal a skeletal rodent atop the anthropomorphic personification of Death. It was dressed n a similar slice of midnight and it carried a similar, although scaled down, version of the scythe 

They looked solemnly down at the pathetic smattering of chicken remains that Jack O'Neill's most recent barrage had spread across a dozen square metres of garden. There were feathers and gory globules everywhere one looked.

"THAT WAS SOMETHING OF AN OVER KILL," The skeleton commented. The voice, if you could call it a voice, was like two tombstones rubbing together, full of foreboding undertones. 

The skeleton clutched a leather-bound, gold embossed book in one hand, and anchored the scythe in the crook of it's elbow of the other while it rummaged around in the satchel slung over the horse. It's hand emerged with an egg timer clutched in it's bony fingers. The sand had all run out.

The huge white horse tossed its head and snorted derisively. It seemed that it was still having trouble finding the ground with its feet, or maybe it just didn't care. Two of them were a couple of centimetres above the ground and the other two were embedded a couple of centimetres into the ground.

"HENRIETTA HEN," the skeleton said significantly. "THIS IS YOUR LIFE!" He proffered the book.

The shade of Henrietta Hen tilted her head on one side and peered closely at the book. Inside the confines of it's covers, the pages had become silent for the first time in years. The chicken scratchings that had been busy chronicling the life of Henrietta the Hen had only just recently come to a scratching and abrupt halt. 

It wasn't as though she cared.

The book didn't look like anything to eat, but she decided to test it any way. She pecked at it. 

No it was definitely not food.

She gave up on the book to look for better pickings on the ground.

"THAT DIDN'T GO AT ALL WELL," Death told his tiny bony black robed rodent companion. "LET'S HAVE ANOTHER LOOK AT THAT SCRIPT." A piece of paper rustled between the bony fingers of his hand. "MUMBLE, MUMBLE, INSERT NAME HERE, THIS IS YOUR LIFE… MUMBLE, MUMBLE. OH THERE'S A FOOT NOTE; DAMN I HATE THAT." 

He climbed aboard his Horse (which for some reason had the less than portentous name of Binky). Death paused for a moment while he looked significantly at the stargate. It rested malignantly on the other side of the window. He shook his head sadly. "THAT THING HAS BEEN HERE FOR LONGER THAN A WHOLE DAY AND ALL I'VE GOT TO SHOW FOR IT IS ONE DEAD CHICKEN. IT JUST ISN"T RIGHT. OK, WHERE DO I FIND THE NEXT HUMAN?" Death consulted whatever aspect of space-time it was that he used for the storage and processing of the infinite amount of information he had to deal with on a day to day basis, "AH THERE'S THE NEXT ONE."

*

There was no returning fire. Jack O'Neill took one more look through the open window, gun in a two handed grip, legs splayed. He holstered the gun and then leapt over the windowsill. He fell further than he thought before he landed heavily on a rose bush. He spent a few seconds disentangling his fatigues from the thorns and then a few more brushing at the little dribbly cuts on his hands and neck. 

Then he was off after the other flash of purple that he saw weaving between the mis-matched shrubbery. It was heading for the fence at the far end of the garden. That wouldn't do. He had to stop it before it got out of the compound. If it got into the city outside he might never find it again.

O'Neill ran on, dodging between the mis-proportioned statues and the shrubbery himself. 

The fleeing figure stopped, turned aimed the staff.

O'Neill struggled to come to a halt and find a bit of decent cover.

The bush beside O'Neill burst into flame. It was onlt luck that prevented O'Neill from being toasted. Luck and a tripping over a ten centimetre tall bird bath. He wasn't looking a gift horse in the mouth. He rolled with the fall and then ducked behind a stone bench, which like most things designed by B.S. Johnson, it was brilliantly conceived but lacked a certain attention to detail. It was eleven feet high and not equipped with stairs. It was bulk and it provided cover. That was all that mattered.

*

It was an impressively proportioned white horse and it snickered behind Mustrum Ridcully. The wizard blinked once and then turned slowly, certain of what he was going to see and far from pleased at the prospect.

"What are you doing here?" Ridcully demanded. "My time is not for ages yet."

Everyone knows that wizards can see death and they have a certain foreknowledge of when their time is neigh.

"I KNOW," said Death in that voice of his that sets hearts and tremble and bladders a wobble. "IT'S JUST THAT, WELL, YOU'RE RESPONSIBLE FOR MY NEXT APPOINTMENT. SO, I THOUGHT, I'LL JUST TAG ALONG. THAT IS, IF YOU DON'T MIND?"

Ridcully turned away and did his best to ignore the seven-foot skeleton riding the giant white horse beside him. It is a testimony to the quantity of bizarre things that happen on the disc world that he managed a fair job of it.

A small piece of fence exploded out of the brickwork behind Ridcully, it was followed immediately by a high pitched whining noise that trailed away into the afternoon. Ridcully pulled his head in before it took it into its mind to do the same thing as the brickwork.

"THAT WAS JOLLY CLOSE, I MUST SAY," Death said. "IT'S A WONDER I DON"T SPEND MORE TIME WITH YOU IF YOU GO THROUGH LIFE DOING THINGS LIKE THIS FOR ENTERTAINMENT."

Ridcully wasn't having any of that line of reasoning. The subject needed to be changed quickly. Now what was a suitable subject? "How's your grand-daughter making out?" Ridcully asked Death. After he spoke he realised how bizarre the conversation must sound.

"SUSAN IS JUST FINE. WE DON"T GET TOGETHER AS OFTEN AS I MIGHT LIKE BUT ISN"T THAT ALWAYS THE WAY WITH ADULT CHILDREN."

"I guess so," said Ridcully who, as a celibate Wizard, knew nothing of that sort of human behaviour at all. He had met Susan Sto Helit on one memorable occasion when she was filling in on the family business as you might call it.

Another piece of brickwork exploded from the wall and in the aftermath it showered fine pink powder over Ridcully. 

The most insulting aspect of the dusting was the way the powder passed through Death and Binky as if they weren't there before it finally settling on Ridcully.

"YOU HAVE AN APPOINTMENT WITH ME, SORT OF," Death intoned. "IT"S TIME WE MADE OUR WAY."

Jack O'Neill broke from cover behind the stone bench and stole more of the distance separating him from Mustrum Ridcully.

Ridcully raised his staff and began reciting.


	9. Chapter 9

The one they called Teal'c had disappeared, probably turned into something small and primeval. 

Jack O'Neill and Mustrum Ridcully had tried to kill each other.

The young blonde woman from O'Neill's team had disappeared.

There had been magic and noise, smoke and panic.

It was just another day in the Ankh Morpork City Watch.

The humorous tableau being conducted so adroitly beneath the table had reached an impasse. The frog wasn't coming out and Stibbons had stopped banging his head on the underside of the tables. He had started to use his head for other things, like thinking. He decided to try the patient approach. He waited for the frog to make its next move.

The frog watched him with amphibian disdain.

The sort of attention to inaction that sat behind both of those decisions hardly made good spectator sport. 

"Carrot," Vimes said finally. He would really enjoy watching this sort of spectacle all day, but there was work to be done. 

Carrot dragged his attention away from the day's entertainment somewhat reluctantly. Until the frog comedy had begun, the whole shooting match had happened way too quickly for any sort of appropriate police action on his part. Carrot was extremely annoyed by the manner of their conduct. Mustrum Ridcully should have known better.

"Yes, sir," Carrot replied. He watched Vimes expectantly.

"Can you slip out into the garden and round those two idiots up before someone gets hurt?"

Carrot reluctantly pushed himself off the wall and started heading for the window. "Certainly." He strode across the room and leapt athletically through the open window. He missed the roses and landed lightly. In the distance he heard a series a cracks and knew which was he needed to head.

Vimes scratched his match against Detritus. It burst into flame. "Sorry sergeant," he apologised. The smell of cigar smoke filled the air with its distinctive brand of aromatic assault. Vimes drew a lung full through his mouth and heaved a huge smoky sigh.

"S'OK sir," said Detritus. "I know how it is."

"Do you Sergeant? I would hope not. It's just; I have one of these, or I have a drink, and you know how it is with drinking."

The troll nodded enthusiastically. "Yessir," he agreed. Vimes watched the heavy air-cooled and heat-sinked helmet suspiciously. It didn't look like it was going to fall off the Troll on his head, but you could never be too sure. "Two's not enough," supplied Detritus, "and one's way too many."

Vimes frowned back at the Troll. "Sometimes you surprise me Sergeant."

"It'd pretty cold in here."

"There is that," Vimes conceded and then turned to Angua. "Got a job for you too Sergeant."

*

Samantha Carter picked up the first weapon that she found lying on the floor and played her thumb across the edge. It was very thin and very strong. Some one could get hurt if they were on the wrong side of that thing.

"Just follow me," a female voice came from the shadows behind her. Samantha Carter spun around (carefully; you never knew what unexploded traps might still be lurking in the not-so-innocent looking walls of that hallway). The knife attacked to the slender timber gantry that she had been examining clinked quietly against the wall. "I've worked out how to avoid the traps," Angua continued. "We'll be able to get out of here a lot more safely that way."

A tallish blonde woman, who might almost have been a mirror image of Carter - if not for the extravagantly long hair, the chain mail and the gleaming armoured breastplate - could just be made out lurking in the shadows beneath the doorway through which Carter had just alighted. "I've been asked to keep an eye on you. I'll just tag along. You don't mind?"

Carter was taken aback. "Should I?"

Angua shrugged. "Just being polite," she dismissed. "It's something new that Carrot suggested that I try." Angua leant against the wall and kicked one of the spring-loaded swords away from her foot. It moved away quickly and then slunk most of the way back to where it had been.

"Carrot?" Carter struggled to catch up. The conversation seemed to be racing away from her at a furious rate.

"The big guy back there with the red hair," The blonde woman answered. "He was in the room back there with Commander Vimes and Detritus."

Carter detected something in the tone, something wistful. "Carrot and you…?"

Angua nodded. "Yeah, although being a werewolf doesn't help."

"Werewolf?" Samantha tasted the word, it was better than trying to swallow the implications. 

"Commander Vimes has asked that I be completely open with you."

"Oh," Carter managed. No, Carter decided, she had to think about it. She slowly drew a conclusion, working her way through a state of muddle-headed disbelief, that yes, she could see that being a werewolf would not help anybody in anything related to human interaction. Except possibly in the act of feeding? 

"Angua," the woman said and then thrust out her hand.

Just for a moment Carter wondered which of them - Angua or Carrot - was the werewolf and then decided that it would be too impolite to ask. "Samantha," she answered. She took the hand and shook it briefly. "Where are we going?"

"Where ever you want, within reason. Commander Vimes has asked me to give your gonnes back to the other members of your team and then get you the hell out of this place. That's his end goal."

*

Daniel Jackson Stepped from behind the overturned bookcase that had provided him with cover and scratched his head. This whole mission had gone pear shaped in a space ship and he wasn't sure what he should do now. Jack's call of Goa'uld hadn't made any sense to Jackson, but he was at a loss to understand how else to explain what happened to Teal'c. He had just disappeared.

A thump from beneath the table at the centre of the room caught his attention. He bent to have a look at what was going on under there.

*

With the other team members neatly accounted for, Vimes and Detritus leant against the wall and watched the latest in Ponder Stibbon's efforts to catch the frog that had once been the Jaffa, Teal'c. 

Patience hadn't worked. Like a wizard had a hope of 'out waiting' something as brain dead and lazy as a frog. Who was he kidding?

Teal'c croaked mockingly.

Ponder tried leaping after it and his head found the table again.

*

O'Neill leapt over the fence and found himself once again in the streets of down town Morpork. Only minutes earlier he had avoided the subtly camouflaged trap that was the ho-ho (like a ha-ha only much deeper. B.S. Johnson again) by skidding violently and grabbing hold of a bush. It had turned out to be a rose bush. His left had had stopped bleeding but it still hurt like hell. He didn't have time to think about that right now.

Somewhere on the street ahead of him, the rotund form of the Arch-chancellor of the Unseen University, Mistrum Ridcully, was racing along the street at the sort of speed that belied his girth. Nothing like being chased by a denizen of the dungeon dimension to lend urgency to your step, and his steps were quite urgent now. 

The street all around them was awash with people. O'Neill was not prepared to take the shot with so many bystanders in the firing line.

A crowd had gathered around a speaker who was in turn hectoring the crowd from the moral high ground of being the one who thought to bring a soapbox and then climbed on board. The crowd listened to his editorial on their failings. A few critics hefted pieces of old fruit, ready to pass instant judgement. It was just the sort of street theatre for which Ankh Morpork was famous.

Ridcully burst into the crowd, scattering people and fruit into the air.

Narrative convention demands a few panicked chickens, squawking away from the melee. So there they are, one was red and the other was white. They flapped a few times and managed to get themselves onto the top of the awnings over the entry door leading into a bakery. A cow and a pig lurched out of the same melee, making their characteristic noises and lurching into the street.

Amid the melee, the speaker landed on his backside after a large woman pushed him from his soapbox. She in turned cannoned off the ricocheting form of Mustrum Ridcully and toppled with the kind of unstoppable momentum of an avalanche. 

In a superb piece of comic timing the speaker and the well-processed remains of one of the upset chicken's breakfast coordinated their plummet to the ground.

The bab- boonk splat might have been played by Keith Moon or John Bonham from heaven.

Wearing an appropriate frown, the speaker wiped his suddenly dirty face and watched the rotund form of the wizard in his frenzied retreat. Ridcully was now a long way down the street and the distance was increasing very rapidly.

A few of the more alert souls among the scattering crowd worked out what was going on and panicked with more enthusiasm than they had displayed in doing anything else to date. Nothing gets the population of Ankh Morpork more excited than the sight of a wizard running. Inevitably there was something fundamentally nasty and frequently fatal following along behind him and no one was hanging around to find out what manner of tentacled beast it might be.

The street became a busy place. Undecided on a particular direction, people were running every which way.

O'Neill raced around the corner, barely restraining his momentum on the slippery cobblestones and then he slid to a halt. Damn, it was chaotic down there. He lost sight of the Goa'uld amid the bustle of the street and he scanned the chaos carefully in the hope of catching sight of it again. He heaved a few heavy breaths and took stock. Amid the frantic clearing of the street, he thought he saw a flash of purple robe which must have been the Goa'uld once again. O'Neill stepped after him.

He didn't get far.

The cow that had been through this same patch of roadway during it's panicked flight and it had left behind some excess baggage; all the better for it to take flight, reduce it's inertia and such. There it lay upon the cobbled street, steamed still, not yet finished with cooling from body temperature to air temperature.

O'Neill placed one foot in it and found that the corfficient of friction between boot sole and cow manure was somewhat less than that between boot sole and cobbles. He kicked that foot toward the sky like a can-can dancer, although he nothing like the skill, dexterity or natural grace. He landed with a thump to his backside. He managed at the last minute to avoid landing in the cow manure by twisting during his fall and landing painfully on his bony hip rather than the fleshy part of his buttocks. He had to land that way; it hurts more. 

When O'Neill hit the ground his trigger-finger flinched and a barrage of lead pellets burst from his gun and raked the wall of the building across the road. In passing it mowed down the tread bare strapping that anchored the sign above the butcher's shop. It swung ponderously from the one remaining strap.

The large woman who had earlier bounced off the speaker was in the process of regaining her feet. No one seemed to be taking any notice of her plight or helping her to her feet so she had to do it herself. It was a laborious job and might have been better performed by a medium sized crane. Instead she had just her flabby arms and her wobbly legs with which to do the job. They weren't the best tools in the shed.

Her efforts weren't helped by the sudden approach of a large timber placard advertising Gordon's prime ribs and beef cuts. The word "beef" caught her eye, (breaking her nose at the same time). She pitched backwards, and as a consequence the speaker once again found himself flattened against the cobblestones.

O'Neill clambered awkwardly to his feet. He left leg was partially numb from the impact between his left buttock and the cobblestones.

After a few hobbled paces along the street he concluded that there was no sign of the vivid purple robe. The Goa'uld was gone.

"Damn," O'Neill spat.

"Hot sausage in a bun?" inquired a man from beside him. 

O'Neill turned to see who might have approached him and what it was that he wanted. 

The man was standing by a cart filled with some sort of meat like substance that had long since been boiled to death. A stack of cheap buttered rolls waited on one end of the trolley, patently prepared in the hope of being wrapped around one of the sausages. In the vendor's hand he held one of his wares, supported by a soggy white thing that might have once been a member of the bread pile. The vendor waved his wares about hopefully. 

If O'Neill had had the opportunity to eat lunch earlier in the day - instead of lying unconscious on a slab in the watch house - the thing being offered to him would have appeared utterly disgusting. As it was the sight of that sausage in that bun bordered on revolting and he was not tempted in the slightest. That was not salivation he was experiencing. It was the horrible moistening of the mouth in preparation for diluting the concentration of stomach acid when it accompanies breakfast on the way back out through the orifice it had used when being fed into the body.

"People actually buy these things?" O'Neill asked. He looked closely at the floating sausages. "And eat them?" You didn't boil sausages, you immolated them. What was this guy thinking.

"Genuine C.M.O.T. Dibbler's sausages," the vendor said as though that was a recommendation. "These are the best that money can buy."

O'Neill had another look. "Which part of C.M.O.T. Dibbler was cut up to make these sausages?"

"No, no," the man said emphatically. "I must have got the patter wrong. I've only had this franchise for a few days and the patter is still a bit rusty."

"Franchise?" asked O'Neill. He was appalled.

"Yeah it's the latest thing in town. Mr Dibbler is offering us all the opportunity to sell these sausages under his banner, so we can operate our own small business, and he looks after all the advertising for us. It works a treat."

O'Neill almost asked how much the franchise cost, but decided not to embarrass the poor man any further, although someone who sold Dibbler's sausages for a living probably couldn't have any shame anyway. Instead O'Neill asked, "Have you seen a great big man in a purple robe and a pointed hat run past here? He has this long beard and…"

"Mr Ridcully, the University Archchancellor? Yeah I saw him a couple of minutes ago. He was hiding under my cart for a bit and then said something about the smell of real food and then ran that way. You only just missed him, and…Oh… There he is now! If you hurry you might catch him before he gets around that, oh too late."

Jack O'Neill was already running long before the sausage salesman finished his speech.

From his vantage-point behind the cornerstone of the Ankh Morpork opera house. Ridcully caught sight of the running figure in military fatigues and leapt back to the flight. He had his breath back and could make pretty good time. 

He hustled around a corner and avoided an on-rushing cart by the expedient of turning the horse into a frog. If you're on a good thing stick to it. 

The owner of the cart was a man with the unfortunately coincident name of Oliver Cartwright. After several unremarkable years of his life spent growing cabbages on the Sto Plains, the unfortunate Oliver Cartwright chose this particular day to enliven his existence with a trip to the Ankh Morpork markets. He was busy looking for a place to park his cart and set up his stall when his horse just disappeared.

The cart rolled to a clattering halt after the loss of the horse and then teetered nose first toward the road. It's momentum caused the nose of the cart to dig into the cobbles and it toppled onto its side. 

Cartwright fell out of the seat and landed with a thud on his head. This was just the first of his trials. He rolled on the ground and then climbed to his feet drunkenly. He waited for his head to clear before he could work out what had gone wrong. 

O'Neill rounded the corner and saw Ridcully lining up the shot with his staff. O'Neill let out a panicked yelp, ground to a sudden comical halt, ran on the spot and cart-wheeled his arms for a moment just like the best of cartoon characters before he scrambled behind the cover of the wall. He made it just in time to avoid the bolt that Ridcully let fly.

The bolt was enough to subdue a medium sized dungeon dimension denizen. There was none of those available anywhere in the place to stop it. The bolt hit the upturned cart amidships. Octarine fire obliterated everyone's vision for a few moments. The cart exploded in a shower of hay, flames, timber splinters and nails. For some reason there was no sign of cabbages in the wreckage. 

O'Neill hid in the doorway of a business that advertised 'Stronginthearm swords clearance sale - fifty percent off' and waited for the shower of shredded cart to finish raining onto the roadway.

Comic narrative requires that a flaming wheel bounces on the pavement and then rolls past our baffled hero with flame licking from its periphery. And there it goes now. O'Neill watched it pass wearing a befuddled expression on his face. The cart's wheel rolled drunkenly along the road, past O'Neill's hiding place and then toppled over; orbiting on its side for several seconds while it's angular momentum slowly dissipated in a crescendo of noise.

"Hey that was my cart," Oliver Cartwright cried out. He was so angry he did something completely out of character. He strode confidence forth to confront Ridcully.

"Here my man," Ridcully said. The man had the cheek to step between him and O'Neill, just when Ridcully was lining up for another bolt. He forestalled the spell with a visible effort.

Cartwright's horse chose that moment to become a horse again, having done with being a frog. Unfortunately it was in mid leap. It landed on Cartwright with a thud.

*

"AH, THERE HE IS, RIGHT ON TIME," Death said with a satisfied air. He stepped past Ridcully and stood over the body of Oliver Cartwright. He cleared his throat - maybe, oh well… he made a noise like he was clearing his throat, if he had one. "OLIVER CARTWRIGHT THIS IS YOUR LIFE." Death waved the now silent copy of the man's life story before him.

The shade of Oliver Cartwright was looking down at the crumpled hoof impressed body on the ground.

"That's me isn't it," he said in a small distracted voice. He turned to face death. "I'm dead?"

"OLIVER CARTWRIGHT THIS IS YOUR LIFE." Death waved the book at him again.

"How can this be my life?" Cartwright asked in a deeply befuddled manner. "I would have thought this was my death."

"OLIVER CARTWRIGHT THIS USED TO BE YOUR LIFE." Death waved the book at him again.

Cartwright looked at the book and the befuddled expression became a bemused expression on his simple face. "Is this for me?" he said.

"YES!" Death pounced. This wasn't gong well.

"Wow," Cartwright opened a page and looked at the first entry. He was still reading from the book when he faded from view. If any witnesses to his passing were uncharitable, they might say he expression was fading from wonderstruck to gobsmacked just before he disappeared from sight. That might have been for the realisation that his father was not the man he called dad.

"STILL NOT QUITE RIGHT," Death told his skeletal rodent companion. "THERE'S STILL SOMETHING MISSING."

"SQUEEK," said the death of rats.

"THAT'S EASY FOR YOU TO SAY." Death said and leapt onto Binky the almost magic horse. He rode slowly along the road, which is not to say that he rode along the pavement, it was just that he rode along the idea of the gap between buildings where its essential road-ness resided. Binky's hooves missed the roadway by a good ten centimetres.

Death stopped not far from where O'Neill was waiting in the doorway for the smoke and debris to clear. Death turned his cowl encased skull toward O'Neill's hiding place. The sapphire gleam of his eyes peered into the gloom while he carefully examined the leader of SG-1 for a long time. If he could have blinked Death would have done so. He looked deeply into the shadow again and then shook his head once more. Death rode on. It was not often that Death dealt with repeat business and those rare occasions tend to stick in your mind even when you're an anthropomorphic personification.

For a moment there O'Neill had the feeling that someone had walked over his grave, but it was gone almost before he became aware of it. He shook himself to clear his head of a sudden and short-lived dread. Back to his right state of mind, O'Neill leapt from the shelter of the doorway and levelled his gun in the direction of the last place where he had seen Ridcully. There was no sign of the Goa'uld amid the wreckage that filled most of the roadway.

"Damn," O'Neill spat into the street. He had a clear line of sight, with no bystanders - other than the guy crumpled on the roadway - and there were no targets.

O'Neill pulled another clip from his belt and loaded it into the magazine of his gun. He was just about to set off in pursuit when he found him self prevented from running along the roadway again by a massive hand gripping his upper arm.

"Mr Vimes would like you to come back and join the fun," Carrot said. "Those were his very words."

"Yeah. OK," said O'Neill. "I've lost him any way."

"He won't have gone far sir. The wizards always seem to finish up back at the University. It's the only place they can get well enough fed. I'm sure that if you wanted to speak with Mr Ridcully at a later date I could arrange it for you."

O'Neill blinked at Carrot for a moment. University, he thought, of course, where else would the Goa'uld congregate.

*

Teal'c was still wearing the guise of a frog. 

The horse, that other victim of Ridcully's spell, had only remained transformed into a frog for a very short time. It had much more body weight to hide in that magical realm than did Teal'c, so thaumalogically speaking the spell couldn't last anywhere near as long. 

Teal'c was going to take several hours to revert back to sort of human form again. In the mean time there was the life of a fancy-free amphibian to experience. Now all he needed was a gullible princess. Where was Samantha Carter when you needed her?

Ponder Stibbons had given up on being patient and he had given up being crafty. He decided to revert to frantic grabbing. He made one last lurch after the frog. He hit his head on the leg of another of the tables. Again. Nothing had changed, he realised. He had just experienced a case of wishful thinking.

Teal'c landed on top of a pile of rock and croaked judgementally at the supine form of Stibbons.

"I got him," said the pile of rocks.

"Thank god for that," muttered Stibbons. He crawled from beneath the table, needing three hands to rub the damage to his head and both shoulders.

"I tink we need to take you to see Igor," said Detritus to Teal'c. "See if he can put you back right."

"It'll wear off," Ponder said despondently.

"I might be a troll, but I'm not fick enuff to take da word of someone who crawls under da table to hunt a frog. Dat's not da way ta get cre-dib-ili-ty in dis town."

This time Daniel Jackson was sure the voice came from the pile of rocks in the corner. It was just that he didn't care any more.

He wondered where the rest f SG-1 had gone and what they were up to. He probably should find out.

Vimes was scratching his head, obviously none to wiser as to the Patrician's whereabouts. He looked once at Jackson, but there was no answers coming from that quarter.


	10. Chapter 10

Caught out by the sudden approach of footsteps, Sacharissa and Otto quickly looked around the Patrician's office, searching frantically for a place to hide. The curtains would do, she decided at the last minute. They made a last minute dive for cover.

The iconograph got tangled in the curtain and refused to hide properly. Otto made one last attempt to tug it to safety and that gave up. He just hoped whoever came through the passage failed to observe it.

He waited behind the curtain looking as stuffed as the Count in Sesame street.

So it was that Sacharissa and Otto were lurking in the shadows provided by the heavy velvet curtains that framed the windows of the Patricians office when Samantha Carter and Angua walked through the office on their way back to the Watchhouse. 

"So that is normally a secret passage," Carter said, looking over her shoulder at the corridor of pain through which she had just delicately woven her path.

"Designed to keep either some one in or someone out," Angua commented. "I just wish I knew which of those it was."

Gaspode trotted along behind them.

Angua gave one sniff on the way past, as though she was searching for something illusive, a certain difficult-to-identify perfume, but the smell of Gaspode slinking along behind them overrode the smell of vampire and human and so Angua missed the lurking reporters.

Carter and Angua began chatting animatedly about the combined IQ of military or police males as they made their way out of the office and into the hallway. They quickly drew the conclusion that lower than average IQ combined with testosterone led to some interesting side-effects. Examples were quoted. They spent a few moments trying to top one another's anecdotes, each delivered with a sardonic air and a certain patient patronising affection, sort of like telling a story about how clever your pet dog sometimes manages to be. They were both still laughing when their voices faded into the background noise of down town Ankh Morpork..

"Secret passage," Sacharissa muttered while she tugged Otto from behind the curtains. "Come on," she said. "I think we'll be OK now." 

"I am Coming," said Otto.

"Keep someone out? Keep someone in?" she wondered out loud.

And together they raced toward the entrance to the not-so-secret-any-more passageway. Otto seemed to have no problem keeping up with Sacharissa despite the bulky iconograph he carried over his shoulder.

Sacharissa stepped into the passageway.

"Oh," She said when she realised just what it was that all the sharp things dangling from the ceiling were intended to do to anyone that happened to be walking along the corridor. She skidded to an abrupt halt. 

Her sudden halt caught Otto completely off guard. He had been watching behind him, trying to make sure that the palace staff didn't spot them sneaking into the passage. Since their surreptitious entrance through the servant's entrance, Otto and Sacharissa had already been through a couple of close shaves where guards had rounded bends almost in time to catch them in the act (thank goodness for the plethora of curtains and tapestries), and he was starting to get a trifle worried about the consequences if they were found. It was one thing to be a vampire and essentially a member of the un-dead (or 'differently corporeal' depending on the publisher of your politically correct dictionary) but it was quite another to be caught sneaking into the Patrician's palace. 

Thus went his thinking and Otto was so caught up with the whole paranoia thing that he missed Sacharissa's sudden stop. That was all he missed. He managed to hit everything else.

Sacharissa was the first thing he failed to miss.

Sacharissa made one violent lurch and very nearly somersaulted into the zone of weapon's deployment. 

Amid a frantic wind milling of arms and the expulsion of one huge breath she managed to right herself at the lip of the last cobblestone before the danger zone.

Otto wasn't so lucky. 

He took one whirling fist beneath the jaw during Sacharissa's attempts to right her momentum, and then he stumbled. His feet tangled in the legs of the iconograph. He tripped. Sacharissa watched in dread when he went down. She was nothing like fast enough to prevent his fall. He landed on the up turned blade of a broad sword. It punctured his chest and poked through his vest like a metal version of the thing climbing out of the astronauts chest in Alien. Afterward, Otto sprawled on the floor, looking just like a bat that had been accidentally collected by a butterfly collector.

"Otto!" Sacharissa screamed.

"Oh," Otto said. He touched the tip of the sword with a tentative finger. "It's nothing. It's not even vood. Just help me to my feet and I'll be as good as new."

Sacharissa blinked a couple of times before she leapt to the vampire's aid. "You're sure you're OK?" she asked disbelievingly.

"Not even a flesh vound. They should be more careful leaving these things laying around. Somevun might get hurt."

Sacharissa took his outstretched hand and dragged the Vampire to his feet. She looked at the dry hole in his vest and then shook her head to clear it. "OK," was all she said.

Otto spent a moment to dust himself off before continuing. "Vot do ve do now?"

Sacharissa took a few moments to get her mind around the events of the last few minutes. "OK. OK," She took one large breath and slowed her heart as much as she could under the circumstances. "Get an iconograph of this hall," she hissed.

"I'll need ze flash," Otto said warily. "You vill spot for me if I should over do it?"

Sacharissa understood this one. She nodded. "Yes, but hurry."

Otto fussily arranged the iconograph on the tripod and held up the flash. It went zap and the room lit up more than it would have been if the roof was pulled off and it was exposed to daylight. The sound of furious brush strokes filled the iconograph. 

"Oh, sh…." Said Otto and fluttered to the floor, reduced to a cloud of fine ash particles by the light. 

The tiny glass vial that had, until quite recently, been dangling around his neck hit the floor with a muffled thud. It failed to break, thus not releasing the drop of blood that would have reconstituted the body of the vampire. They had tested this repeatedly, just in case the photographic Vampire had this kind of problem while in the field, and it had worked every time in testing.

The vial rolled across the floor heading directly for one of the openings in the wall through which one of the weapons had had been hiding.

"Oh –ing hell," Sacharissa said with considerable feeling. She dived onto the floor and scrambled frantically after the vial. 

Like all good narrative devices, this is an opportunity that we cannot ignore. Despite her best efforts, Sacharissa only managed to tap the vial with the tips of her fingers, so that instead of stopping just on the threshold of the hole like it would have done if she had just waited for it to come to a halt naturally, the blood filled vial accelerated further into the hole and disappeared from sight.

Sacharissa climbed to her feet and cursed. She looked down at herself and realised that she was covered in a layer of fine powder. She dusted at it absently while she stared at the hole in the wall, scheming ways to get her hands on the little glass vial. 

Something about what she was doing didn't seem right and she looked slowly down at herself disbelievingly. Slowly she realised what she was doing.

"Arghhhh," she said and held her hands as far from herself as possible. "Otto…" she said weakly and looked at her left hand. The dust that was caked there represented his left leg.

*

"So you're the one they call Daniel Jackson," Vimes said. He drew a huge draft through his cigar. He pulled the thing from his mouth and hissed the smoke through his teeth.

"What, oh yes," Jackson looked up from his inspection of one of Leonard De Quirm's papers. It was a struggle but he found he was able to read it with a bit of effort, provided he frowned in just the right way and bit his tongue. He stood up hurriedly and offered his hand to Sam Vimes.

Vimes placed his cigar back in his mouth and shook the proffered hand. "Is your commander always that trigger happy?"

"No not usually," Jackson answered carefully. He had the idea this discussion was going to prove very important to their long term prospects of getting through this mission in one piece (well four pieces really). "He's been under a lot of stress lately and…"

Vimes wasn't really interested in the explanation. He decided to let Jackson have a few more minutes to begin making up a better one. "Mr Sibbons isn't it?" Vimes asked the still slightly befuddled wizard. He was sitting on the floor nursing his sore head.

Ponder climbed laboriously to his feet. "Yes it is," he answered and stepped away from his nemesis. 

Teal'c sat in the cup of Detritus' hand and watched the wizards movements with the sort of superior air that only a large green bullfrog can conjure up.

"Would you please go fetch Mr Ridcully from the University?" Vimes suggested. "I can't see our gunman catching up with him, not in this town."

Ponder nodded agreeably and then stepped from the room, visibly relieved to be free of the influence of that malevolent frog.

"Daniel Jackson," Vimes said with exaggerated significance. "This is your chance to get your thoughts in order and then… How about you explain to me what this is all about? Especially this last bit." He waved his hand at the open window, thus taking in the whole Ridcully and O'Neill thing. "I don't want the same vague story that your commander fed me. I think I might need a lot more detail than that. I want to know why your commanding officer thought it a good idea to shoot that gonne of his at one of our leading citizens, and why this man," he pointed at the frog, "has a snake in his stomach. And I want to know what it is that we might have to do to protect this town from whatever it is that you people are so paranoid about. Take your time. I have the distinct impression that you're going to need it."

"Well," said Daniel. He was thinking frantically. How was he supposed to put all that into a short oral presentation?

*

On their way to the Watch-house - Pseudopolis Yard - Samantha Carter had her first chance to take a good look around the streets of Ankh Morpork. It was also her first chance to marvel at the haphazard nature of the local architecture. The buildings appeared to be built on top of other buildings (which in fact was true. When the city caught fire, they close the gates on the River Ankh and let it back up and flood the city. Given that there are lava tracts in Hawaii with lower density than the River Ankh, the street level has a habit of rising every time they do it.)

Angua let Carter have her moment of dumbfounded wonder. Angua had gotten over her own fascination with the variety offered by the town a long time ago. Spend a few moments running from whatever it was the city had to offer (or offered to hide) and the new visitor developed a healthy antipathy toward the town. On top of that Angua had once been escorted through the wonders and marvels of Ankh Morpork by its one-man tourism-advertising department - Carrot Ironfounderson - and as a result she was quite immune to urban wonder.

"I don't want to seem rude," Samantha began and then interrupted herself to stare at something across the road. Angua followed her sight line and wondered what it was that so attracted Carter's attention. Her eyes appeared to be tracking a pack of dwarfs. There was seven of them and they were heading into a bar. Nothing unusual in that. Over each shoulder each dwarf carried a giant battle-axe. They were all dressed in chain mail, armour and leather. Again there was nothing unusual in that. They were singing a song about gold. The words were simple. It went; "Gold, gold, gold, gold…" And that was so typical, no one even noticed.

Perhaps it was the dark haired young girl dressed in blue who was following along behind them…

Angua shrugged. Not for her to know, obviously.

Carter appeared to be choking.

"Yes," said Angua, carefully not aiding Samantha in her attempt to say whatever it was she intended to say. She could get past this one on her own.

"OK," said Carter finally.

"You were going to say something…"

"Oh, yeah," Carter began. "How does a human and…a…" How did she put this delicately? Morphologically challenged? Hirsute-ly augmented? What was the politically correct term?

"A werewolf," Angua supplied. 

Ah, that was how, Samantha realised. "Yes!"

They stepped around Arnold Sideways. Carter looked at his cart closely, noting the absence of legs with absent disregard, noting the proffered cup in his right hand even more absently, but paying her full attention to the smell. Her nose wrinkled so much she was going to need ironing.

In his other hand Arnold was proffering a newspaper. Angua stopped and bought one from him. The copper coin she tossed his way clattered in the bottom of the cup.

"On the full moon," Angua told Carter absently while she thumbed through the paper, "there's the dog basket and the doggy flap in the door and the rest of the time…Oh damn."

Angua flipped through the paper from the back to the front. It was the front-page news that caught her eye. De Worde had figured out the reference to the gonne and had even found the references to the previous use of the thing in Ankh Morpork. Damn but the man was good.

"The excrement is really going to fly into the ventilator's impellor now," Angua muttered.

"What is it?" Carter asked. Angua handed her the newspaper with the air of a woman deep in thought. Carter read the front-page article, but was really none the wiser. She finished reading and waited for an explanation.

Angua crouched before the tiny ball of fur and ticks that had been following them. "Gaspode," she said, "I need you to go find Carrot and tell him what happened." She went nto a long explanation of what she needed Gaspode to tell Carrot.

"How's he going to do that?" Carter asked bewildered. Carter had come to the tentative conclusion that the werewolf in the Angua/Carrot home might actually be Angua, not Carrot (she was trying to imagine a red dog and couldn't manage to see the giant Carrot as a Red Setter). If she was going to try speaking to a dog, Carter actually expected Angua to bark at it in it's own language, not treat it like Lassie.

"Yeah, no problem babe," Gaspode answered. "Wonder dog to the rescue again," he muttered as he trotted away. "Just once I'd like a bit of credit for what I do. Maybe I should talk to William De Worde." There was a pause while Gaspode thought that through. "On second thought…" The rest was lost because he was around the corner.

Carter stared after the departing dog with an expression on her face that did not do justice to any assessment of her intelligence.

Angua reached up and shut Carter's mouth with a gentle push of her fingers beneath Carter's chin.

Now, she had things that she had to do.

*

O'Neill accompanied Carrot while he walked along the street of cunning artificers. They were approaching the Hippopotamus Bridge on their way to Pseudopolis Yard. They were both silent for their own reasons while they stepped onto the bridge. Carrot was unusually quiet considering he had a captive audience and a walk through the streets of Ankh Morpork where he might spent the moment selling his town. Instead he was digesting the implications of what O'Neill had to say. It was quite a mouthful, and an idea that needed to be chewed thoroughly before swallowing. He thoroughly understood Commander Vimes' new concept of ideas taster right at that moment. This was a bit more than a taste though.

O'Neill looked over the railing and down at the river Ankh. A flock of ducks were walking along the surface, seeking a clean bit of river so they could get their feet wet. They were wasting their time. The Ankh was probably the only river in the universe where the site of a drowning could carry a chalk outline.

"So you people troop all over the galaxy interfering in other people's live and cultures," Carrot said, almost with the air of someone thinking out loud.

"Well, that's not exactly how it is?" O'Neill said defensively. Carrot had a way of looking at things that seemed totally at cross-purposes to the way O'Neill looked at the world around him. It meant he had to be very, very careful in his selection of words. The guy was so literal.

The sight of the river had been enlightening. He thought he had seen rivers of dirt in the outback of Australia, but it was not quite the same thing as what went under this bridge. It was bit like one of those South American landslides where he had been sent to provide humanitarian support as part of a USA aid package.

"And how is it then?" Carrot asked. Carrot leant against the railing beside O'Neill. He looked down into the river with a different kind of eye to the one that O'Neill used. It wasn't just the way they thought about things that was different, it was also the way they looked at things and what they took away from what they saw.

Carrot had fished the occasional body from off the river Ankh and was always aware that anyone who was thrown into the Ankh would probably bounce and then later the Watch would find them. Throwing yourself into the Ankh was jumping out of a building. Somewhat unforgiving.

"We trade information and ideas on how to go about defeating the Goa'uld," O'Neill explained. "We also exchange cultural ideas and artefacts, that sort of thing."

Carrot pointed at the full holster on O'Neill's hip. "By carrying gonnes?"

"Yeah. Well."

"Lots of gonnes. More than one each in fact."

"Yeah, well you never know when you might run into a Goa'uld."

Carrot came across as simple, but that is not the same as unintelligent. "Like Mr Ridcully," Carrot suggested. Carrot was mastering the art of sarcasm. It was Angua's current hobby/project teaching him the nuances, "who's only a wizard, not some evil alien creature that goes around enslaving people. Well, not since they got rid of that sorcerer who was in charge there for a while, anyway."

O'Neill nodded slowly. "OK, so I might not have got that bit right. Perhaps I was a little hasty, but there's still what he did to Teal'c."

"He's only spending a few hours as a frog. It'll enhance his understanding of other's I'm sure," Carrot said charitably.

"Yeah right," O'Neill said.

Gaspode galloped along the road behind them, wheezing and panting like an out of steam engine, while reduced to moving at a clip barely above walking pace. He wobbled to a halt and tottered a few times before Carrot crouched down reached out a gentle hand to steady him lest he fell over.

"What is it?" Carrot asked Gaspode.

"Huh, huh, huh," said Gaspode. Saliva dripped off his tongue in great dollops that landed on the pavement in virtually a continuous stream.

"Take your time," Carrot admonished.

O'Neill turned way in disgust. "Haven't we got to be somewhere?" he asked tetchily. Playing straight man to a Rastafarian version of Lassie wasn't high on his list of things to do before he died.

"Huh, huh, huh," said Gaspode some more. 

"If Gaspode runs it has to be something important," Carrot explained.

O'Neill rolled his eyes, but he said nothing.

"Angua sent me, huh, huh," Gaspode finally managed. "The paper, huh, huh, huh, is full, huh, huh, of the, huh, huh, gonne, huh, huh, incident." 

O'Neill stared opened mouthed at the dog when it answered Carrot

"From the Drum?" Carrot asked carefully. "Is it a report of what happened this morning?"

"No, huh, huh, the last time, huh, huh, when the Assassins, huh, huh, had the thing and Edward, huh, huh, D'eth found it," Gaspode managed between gasps. He gave a hacking cough and that seemed to clear his throat. "De Worde has worked it all out, huh, huh, D'eth, Beano the clown and the way Dr Cruces used the gonne to try to assassinate the Patrician and… Why is that man staring at me? Huh, huh. Hasn't he ever seen, huh, huh, a talking dog for god's sake?"

"Gaspode…" Carrot reminded him to stay of task.

Gaspode was breathing a bit easier now. "Yeah OK. Anyway, she sent me to tell you that it's all over town now. Everybody knows."

"Everybody knows what?" asked Carrot dangerously.

Gaspode's cocked his head to one side. God, how did they get to the top of the food chain? He wondered. "That the assassins have a weapon that can kill from a great distance, that is much more powerful than a cross bow and quicker to load than a regular bow, and can be used by anybody. And that a bunch of them are on the street and they were used at the Drum last night by a bunch of guys wearing clothes just like that guy over there is…Oh damn."

Gaspode cowered behind Carrot's leg. He had just put two and two together and come up with a nasty surprise.

"Yes," Carrot said with a touch as exasperation. "Gaspode, we know."

O'Neill looked from Carrot to Gaspode and back again.

"And…?" O'Neill asked. He was getting impatient.

"You keep away from me," Gaspode ordered with false bravado.

"Did you get all that from the paper?" Carrot asked.

Gaspode eyed O'Neill uneasily but he figured he would be dead already if this one really meant him any harm. "Nah, it's all over the street now," he said. "I got most of that from listening to the mob that's hanging around outside the Assassin's guild building."

"Oh," said Carrot.

"Mob?" said O'Neill.

"Damn," said Carrot.

"People," muttered Gaspode in the tone of voice that questioned their right to be at the top of the food chain, and then he began chewing on a part of his anatomy in way that very few human could physically manage, except in the occasional performance by Circe De Solei. 

"That sounds bad," O'Neill supplied.

Carrot took the conversational starter. "Oh yes," said Carrot. He sounded disappointed to O'Neill's ear. "That's just what I would have expected the people of this town to do."

"If it gets much worse down there," Gaspode agreed, "then I won't be able to sneak in there for dinner tonight. The place will be locked up tighter than a fishes a… mumble mumble." Gaspode was having trouble talking through the hand that clamped his muzzle shut.

"This sounds like serious trouble," Carrot muttered.

"Is it going to be a riot?" O'Neill asked. He had picked up that much from the tone of Carrot's distracted monologue.

"Eventually," Carrot agreed. "But first it's just street theatre. They've all turned out to see what happens next. It'll only be after Lord Downey gets upset with their disturbing the neighbourhood and then tries to do something about it that it will become a riot. Come on we have to put as stop to this before it gets out of control."

"And just how do we do that?" O'Neill asked. He was wasting his breath. Carrot was already on his way.

"I had a bad feeling he was going to do something like that," Gaspode muttered.

O'Neill looked down at the dog and then marched after Carrot.

Gaspode trotted reluctantly along behind.


	11. Chapter 11

"What's that noise?" Sam Vimes asked. It seemed to be coming from the direction of the Assassin's Guild.

"Dunno sir," Detritus answered. "Do you want I should find out?"

Detritus, Vimes and Jackson stood at the entrance to the Patrician's palace and watched a few stragglers marching along the road, heading for the source of the noise. It was unusual in Ankh Morpork to see a group of people with a common purpose. It was suspicious enough to gain the attention of the City Watch under even the most peaceful of circumstances. If that noise was anything to go by there was no peaceful purpose involved.

"Just stop one of them and find out what's going on," Vimes told Detritus. 

Detritus saluted. His fingers made a neat little tink sound when they collided with his head.

Sam Vimes winced, thinking about the times in the past when Detritus had knocked himself out in his enthusiasm to salute. The air-cooling helmet worked a treat, no two ways about it.

The troll grabbed the first person within reach and extracted him by the collar. He was brought bodily over to speak with Vimes. The man's feet flailed about like a cartoon villain's, to no effect. He wasn't Binky and so he had trouble making motion with his feet clear of the ground. His frantically flailing feet fluttered fitfully to a hesitant halt the moment he was confronted with the lugubrious expression of Sam Vimes's face.

Quailed, thought Vimes, I always wondered what quailed looked like. Now I know.

"You can't do this to me," the man hanging from Detritus' hand complained.

That struck Vimes as vaguely amusing. He almost smiled. "It's the century of the Fruit Bat and this is the discworld, how can something be impossible?"

Their captive seemed to be suffering from an irony deficiency. He just stared at Vimes.

"You can probably put him down Sergeant," Vimes told Detritus and then blew a ring of cigar smoke into the air. The air accepted the additional combustion products with ill grace.

Detritus dropped the man in front of Vimes. He sort of landed upright. He looked around like running might be an option. It wasn't.

"You want to tell me what's going on?" Vimes suggested.

"Why should I?"

"Detritus…"

"It's all happening at the Assassin's guild," the man explained quickly. It all came out as one long word and Vimes found himself translating as though being confronted with a foreign language. "I was just going down to have a look with a few of my mates and we thought…" He trickled to a halt.

"We thought… What?" Vimes prompted. 

"We thought we might go down and show those assassins what it's like to live in this town," he finished in a small voice.

"How unusual," Vimes commented.

Many like minded citizens continued to march past. Each of them cast an uneasy eye toward the Vimes, Jackson, Detritus tableau and hurried forward, glad it wasn't them.

The unfortunate wretch that Detritus had rescued from making a fool of himself had a copy of the Ankh Morpork Times in his hand. Vimes took it from his unresisting fingers and read the contents. "Most people find the assassin's guild a place to avoid, lest one attracts their attention," Vimes commented vaguely.

The guy with Detritus' finger prints in his collar blinked at Vimes a couple of times and then rubbed his throat where the collar of his shirt had borne his weight. He could count himself lucky that the shirt had been strong enough to carry his weight. Many of the shirts in his wardrobe would not. In Ankh Morpork, inferior quality goods are available on every street corner. (Except for the ones where the ladies of negotiable affection hung out. This being Ankh Morpork, there were experts in that field on every third street corner.)

"Oh bloody hell," Vimes muttered and screwed the paper up in a trembling fist. "Detritus, go see if you can break that little gathering up, while Dr Jackson and I round up his gonnes. I think it's time we tried to get this whole stargate team out of town before they get lynched."

"Right you are sir," Detritus saluted, with a gentle clink of his stone fingers against the air-cooled helmet that he frequenty wore. He turned and followed the gathering crowd.

*

"I knew something was odd about this place," Samantha Carter told Angua. They were running toward the Assassin's Guild House. "But I would never have guessed that magic works here. Not if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes."

"If you want to live through the next couple of hours so you can get home you better allow for that fact in everything that you do," Angua told her.

The sounds of people gathering with malice and mayhem on their minds drifted to them from around the next corner in the road. 

Angua was the first to see the gathering of people, animals, trolls and dwarfs that had gathered outside the assassin's guild. Most of them were there out of simple Ankh Morporkian curiosity. A riot was just another form of street theatre to them. They were there to cheer.

Among those who were just curious, were few more thoughtful souls who had decided that the Assassins having a weapon of a less than personal nature made them less than happy about the situation. Among the citizens of Ankh Morpork there was a gathering middle class who had developed an over-inflated paranoia over the presence of the assassin's guild. It was mainly those souls who made money by taking it off other people and not providing quite the level of service or performance that the customer had in mind when they parted with their hard earned cash who thought that way. For those members of the business fraternity, the presence of a team of trained and cash friendly assassins had always been a source of mild concern. The threat of assassination was not the sort of thing to keep you awake at night, that was the role of the creatures from the dungeon dimensions, but it was the sort of thing that prompted you to buy expensive locks and alarms and such. Those things were expensive and there were better things to spend that hard earned cash upon.

And now, of course, there was now this new weapon to deal with. That was the sort of thing to keep one up at night.

Like any developing crowd, this one was quickly surrounded by a flock of sausage sellers, all under the C.M.O.T Dibbler's banner. Dibbler himself was handling the advertising by shouting at the crowd through a make-shift megaphone. 

He was barely audible over the excited babble of the crowd and he began scheming ways to make an impact, something to grab their attention and excite their tastebuds. He would have been better advised finding a different product to sell.

Angua and Carter stopped on the street corner and surveyed the situation.

"God now what do we do?" Carter asked.

"I have an idea," Angua said. Her tone didn't tell Samantha Carter that it was a good idea. Not a good idea at all.

*

Carrot and O'Neill ground to a panting halt on the periphery of the crowd. 

"Oh dear," said Carrot. Any gathering of Trolls and dwarfs in numbers meant trouble. Trolls were basically rocks that moved. Dwarfs were mainly miners of rocks. In the past there had been many misunderstandings. There weren't misunderstandings any more, there was just war.

O'Neill said something with a similar meaning to the statement that Carrot made, although it was slightly more colourfully expressed when O'Neill voice it.

Somewhat in the distance behind them came a sound that went pat, pat, pat. It was the footfalls of a small dog, struggling to keep up with them. Not many people would recognise the sounds of Gaspode complaining about this latest bout of physical exercise over the hacking pant of his laboured breathing. Dogs can't talk; everyone knew that, so no one listened to Gaspode.

Carrot marched forward. O'Neill debated the wisdom of that and then followed him anyway.

"Mr Stronginthearm isn't it?" Carrot said loudly and affably to a small person in the horned helmet and leather armour who he had found standing just at the edge of the crowd. O'Neill saw that diminutive person was carrying a battle scared battle-axe. He wore a beard that would have looked at home on a member of ZZ-Top. "What brings you out here?"

The dwarf's first reaction was to turn around and reach for his axe. "Oh it's you Mr Carrot," he said and relaxed the hand that rested on the axe handle. "Those bastards who killed Cuddy have done it again," the dwarf added.

"Done what again?" Carrot asked. O'Neill looked closely at the huge watchman. There was almost menace in the tone, perhaps, if you were uncharitable. Carrot's hands rested on his hips and his face was creased into a frown.

"You know…" Stronginthearm tried to imply.

"No," Carrot said carefully. "I don't. Perhaps you can tell me."

"Same as they did last time," Stronginthearm said less certainly.

"And what was that?"

Stronginthearm suddenly found that he was suffering from a severe case of dichotomy. He dragged the toe of his boot across the ground. For some reason his tongue wouldn't work.

Carrot pushed his way forward, parting the crowd as thought it were the Red Sea parting for Moses. O'Neill followed in his wake, shaking his head the whole way. There were a lot of those battle scarred and battleaxe-wielding people in the crowd. Their lack of stature made them easy to see over, provided you could ignore the fanciful weaponry. O'Neill found he looking for Snow White and shook his head to clear that bizarre notion from his mind.

Scattered among the crowd there were a number of the giant trolls as well. There was an air of menace about the entire gathering and it was currently focussed on the guild house door. It might not necessarily stay there, that was the problem.

A similar bow wave was threading toward the entrance to the Assassin's Guild head quarters. Ploughing through the human (and non-human) sea like an icebreaker bashing it's way through the Arctic ice floes came a small flotilla that was headed up by the bulk of Detritus.

*

Through the forest of legs, deftly dodging those forgotten feet came a tiny pink bunny, grinning stupidly and beating a drum incessantly. It couldn't be heard over the clamour of the crowd, but it was determined all the same.

*

"Ah I thought I might find you two here," Sam Vimes said. To Fred Colon his voice seemed to come out of nowhere.

Daniel Jackson hovered behind Vimes wondering what he might have to say this time

"Ah, Mr Vimes, we were watching developments and preparing to take action," Fred Colon began uneasily and then progressed with gathering confidence as the idea developed. He never managed much momentum with the thought despite the look of obvious scepticism that stole over Vimes' face. Even Fred had to allow that it sounded pretty lame, so the first word was delivered with trepidation, the last with caution, the rest shaded between those two 'extremes'. "We were finalising our plans," he added hopefully.

"Is that your story Nobby?" Vimes asked the slight figure that huddled beside and partially behind Colon's bulk.

"It was just like Fred explained Mr Vimes," Nobby suggested enthusiastically. He nodded his head like one of those toys that sit on the parcel shelf of old rust buckets. There were none of those on the discworld so the similarity escaped Vimes and Colon.

"So you're really not loitering in a doorway, smoking the last of your doggends and letting the whole mess sort itself out so you can arrest the unconscious," Vimes suggested. "I didn't think so. I'm pleased to hear it."

Fred Colon listened to that description with a growing disconnection. He had been a watchman for nearly thirty years and for most of that time the policing practice that Sam Vimes had just described was exactly the sort of action they had always taken. It was standard operating procedure, and for some reason it was now out of fashion. Fred was still not completely comfortable with the change. Now they were expected to keep the peace, not remark upon it after all the action subsided. It just didn't seem right and it certainly didn't come naturally to him.

"It's time to put your plan into action," Vimes suggested jovially. "So what was it?"

"Ah well sir," Colon said. Behind his eyes his brain was working furiously, unfortunately the furious work involved a lot of motion that was focussed into running in tiny circles.

*

The head chef of the Partician's palace catering service was preparing the last of the day's marinades by placing a few delicate additions into the mixture; those little herbal finishes that separated the truly memorable dining experiences from the merely satisfying. 

A rapid patter of footsteps outside the door was the prelude to a particularly handsome young woman bursting through the kitchen door. She slid to halt in the middle of the room, performing a half pirouette before she came to rest. Her more than ample bosom heaved at the exertion she had made to get into the room so precipitously, which sight distracted the chef from his cooking for a speechless moment. 

Her head whipped every which way, trailing wisps of otherwise severely styled hair. Sacharissa looked around frantically, struggling to find the meat rack. Her eyes lit on it suddenly. She marched across purposefully and started sorting through the meats, looking at each one critically for a moment before turning to the next.

"Here, what are you…?" demanded the head chef, now in charge of his mouth again.

"Get out of my –ing way," Sacharissa snarled and grabbed a haunch of lamb from the hanging rack. It dripped onto the floor. Throwing the lamb over her shoulder she bolted back through the door again.

The chef stared after the gently swinging door and scratched his mostly bald head.

Now that was something that didn't happen everyday.

*

William De Worde sat on the hard timber wheel that had once been attached to a cart. It just lay on the road, apparently abandoned in the street. It not for the scorch mark on the rim, making it unusable as a wheel, it would have disappeared long ago. 

William wrote furiously in his notebook. The vantage-point he had chosen for himself was fifty metres from the periphery of the riot. It was close enough to hear what was said (provided it was shouted but then that's how everything was said during a gathering like that) but it was far enough away to avoid the worst of the likely missiles. He watched the action unfolding outside the Assassin's guild with professional intensity.

Another prospective participant raced along the road that ran past William. The man wore a butcher's gore spattered apron and carried a wicked looking meat cleaver in his hand. He looked at William with a blank expression for a second before skidding to a stop. He strolled back to speak with William.

"You're that De Worde guy right?"

It was this same ritual, enacted half a dozen times a day for William. William put on his meet-the-public face. "Yes."

"Nigel Pearce (56)," the man said. "I saw it all. I was in the Mended Drum when those three assassins came in and tried to assassinate the Unseen University Librarian. You should have seen the action then. It was marvellous. Gee I bet you wished you had your fancy iconograph in there when that happened."

"Where were you when this unfolded Mr Pearce?" William asked. His pencil worked furiously, jotting down the details. He was only listening to the man's story with half an ear, concentrating the rest of his attention on the increasingly cohesive demands of the mob besieging the Assassin's guild. His newspaperman's instinct was already discounting the man's story. The pencil was scratching away on auto-pilot.

"I was hiding under one of the tables. The one where Hansen the Brave broke his arm when he crashed into it. Anyway. I saw it all. It was a huge fight and…"

"Mr Pearce," William said with exaggerated patients. "I've already covered the brawl. I need something on this afternoon's activities."

Nigel Pearce looked dubious for a moment. "Did you get the story about Cartwright's cart?" He hesitated.

"Yes," Wiliiam answered. He was sitting on the wheel left behind in the cart's altercation with Mustrum Ridcully. 

Over the top of Nigel Pearce's head, William watched the bow wave of people flowing out of Detritus' path while he pushed his way through the crowd. 

Ah, things were starting to look up; William considered - the watch had arrived in force. Of course that might only mean Detritus, who was a force on his own, but it still meant the Watch was on the job. 

William found himself wondering where Sacharissa was now. He hoped she and Otto had followed the Watch and were getting plenty of iconographs. This situation looked like it was going to be as big an issue as the last Patrician crisis.

*

Mustrum Ridcully skidded to a halt at the entrance to the Unseen University. He stopped running within of sight of the gate and organised his ensemble a bit more decorously before moving on. It didn't do for the Arch-chancellor to be seen doing anything as undignified as running. It often carried the unfortunate connotation of running 'away'. That just wouldn't do.

Given some of the things that the wizards had done and seen in the past, that was a petty piece of image management, but that was the way Ridcully was wired up. 

Instead of bursting into the grounds at a dead run, he strutted into the grounds in full Arch Chancellor mode. (after one glance back over his shoulder to be sure that the denizen of the dungeon dimensions that had been following him was not in sight. His pursuer had been coherently human shaped for a remarkably long time and Ridcully entertained a nagging and growing doubt about the whole thing, but only for a brief moment. Doubts didn't survive long in the dangerous environment of Ridcully's mind.)

He burst through the entrance to the great hall, still on the stalk, and found most of the discworlds supply of Wizards involved in their primary function; eating a huge dinner. The smell of a coronary in production filled the room and threatened to induce Ridcully's tastebuds into organising a mutiny. He pulled himself together with a visible effort and decided to make his presence known.

"Bursar!" Ridcully bellowed. Half a dozen fat bearded faces looked up from the vast culinary attempt at cellulite production that lay scattered about the table. Each face made a troubled attempt to determine who had had the nerve to disturb their most solemn of rituals. They all saw the Arch Chancellor and the threatening expression they had all assumed at the outset seemed to melt as one. "Runes, I need you as well," Ridcully continued, unaware of the commotion his entrance had caused. "Hustle man we have work to do."

The Lecturer in Recent Runes looked up from his plate of stuffed pheasant and sighed. When the Arch Chancellor got into this kind of mood, Recent Runes lost his appetite entirely. Inevitably this sort of boisterous demand for activity involved tentacles and running, neither of which ranked high in any of his preferred activities lists.

Runes pushed away the now unpalatable remains of dead pheasant and began preparing himself for an unpleasantly active afternoon.

The Bursar was found occupying his usual position - under the table, cowering. He had given up locking himself in boxes and cupboards. Even those with their locks on the inside were not proof against Wizards who could teleport right through the walls. He had been this way almost from the time that Ridcully had taken the chair. A man best suited to the rigours of totting up columns of numbers and ensuring that every document had the appropriate signatures, he was singularly unprepared for the rigours of battle with the dungeon dimension denizens that seemed to flock to Ridcully's battle cry. With the regular ingestion of dried frog pills the bursar could at least function, albeit badly, but that was a short term solution to his problem at best

Ridcully was convinced that the man just needed the correct motivation to get past his hesitation, and that meant a lot of yelling in his face and bullying generally. So far it hadn't worked, but Ridcully was not a man to give up a perfectly good theory simply because someone else had found such inconvenient things as contradictory facts.

The Bursar crawled from beneath the table and followed along like a man being led to his execution, or like a dog slinking in for the inevitable beating.

"What is it this time?" The lecturer in Recent Runes demanded. "Not the dungeon dimensions again." It was meant as a joke. The wizards had not been actively experimenting with that sort of magic for weeks and the alchemists had been remarkably quiet lately. (Well OK, there had been a lot of loud bangs, but that was just chemicals.)

"Good guess man," Ridcully replied. He was almost out the door again. "Someone get the Librarian. I think we need more information."

The Lecturer in recent Runes looked at his pheasant one last time and then turned away. The things he had to put up with…

*

Samantha Carter watched, appalled, while Angua began discarding her clothing. "What are you going to do?" Samantha demanded. 

Angua's helmet clattered to the ground. She crouched gingerly and began unbuckling her boots. "Get myself inside the assassin's guild and see what they're planning," Angua replied. A second boot followed the first. They made an honour guard for the helmet.

"Dressed like that'll get you into all sorts of places, and all sorts of trouble," Carter noted cynically.

"A lot more than you could possibly know," Angua grimaced at a few unsavoury memories.

"What about the mob?" Carter asked.

"They aren't the dangerous ones," Angua replied cryptically. Her breastplate came unbuckled easily and joined the pile on top of her shoes and helmet that were already keeping each other company. The breastplate wasn't impressively beaten for show. Carter could see that now. It was that shape because it had to be.

"Mind that lot for me," Angua said. "It usually goes missing if I'm not careful about it." She looked at the pile ruefully before she added, "and those things are hard to come by." She tossed her chain mail skirt aside casually. Carter showed some discretion by looking away, but not before reaching an obvious conclusion about the brief display of flesh that she had already seen. Angua might not be human, but she certainly looked enough like one that she could find a place for herself posing for the sort of photographs that might appear in the centre of glossy magazines.

Behind Carter's turned back, came a sound like a muffled sneeze - if you had the world's largest sinuses.

A huge golden haired wolf sauntered casually up the alley and dropped to sit beside Carter's feet. Carter's expression could have been used to sell thousands of copies of horror comics to impressionable minors.

"OK," Carter muttered to herself. "I knew it was coming. I did. I knew she was a werewolf. I knew all along." She reached out a tentative hand and patted Angua's head, and scratched her ear. "Nice doggy."

Angua reluctantly endured scratched ears for a moment before sloping off down the alley that lead to the Assassin's guild kitchen.

*

Gaspode the wonder dog was the way he liked to fashion himself. His case was compelling since he was probably the only talking dog on the discworld. He sat outside the tradesman's entrance to the Assassin's guild head quarters and waited for the Kitchen door to open. The night's leftovers were due to be cast away, and they were easily the best pickings available in this town, outside of the University kitchen of course. (But hanging around outside the University kitchen was not an option any more. Not since the last time. Things happened there. Improbable things). The waste products from the University had an unfortunate tendency to cause bizarre consequences. You could be just another self effacing little mongrel dog one minute and the next moment you were a self aware sentient being with existential and philosophical leanings and a mouth full of words that only humans, dwarfs and some trolls could get a handle on. Even being a werewolf would be better than a talking dog.

The sleek golden form of Angua in her wolf guise strolled up and sat beside him.

"Hey," Gaspode said. 

"Don't start…" Angua warned.

"How's about you and me…"

"Must we have this conversation every time we meet?" she asked. Her nose was threatening to mutiny.

"Well look at you," Gaspode said in exasperation. "A dog doesn't stand a chance. You should smell yourself."

"I smell like a werewolf."

"Yeah but a mighty tasty one."

Angua shook her head and then pushed in front of Gaspode so she was closer to the door than he was.

"Hey, that's my…" He trailed off in the face of the look she cast over her shoulder. "Then don't eat it all," he finished lamely.

"I don't intend eating any of it," she shuddered, as only a dog can.

The door opened. Light spilt into the alley.

*

Sacharissa managed to skid to a halt before she scattered the pile of ash that used to be Otto any worse than she had already done earlier. She held the haunch of lamb over the pile and waited for the next drop of blood to fall.

Nothing happened.

"Oh –ing hell," she cursed. A trail of small red spots highlighted her path all the way from the kitchen to the hallway, naturally. Now it decided not to drip.

She shook the haunch a few times, without effect.

She watched the base of the meat some more, and went to throw the thing at the wall. It bounced off the brickwork once and then hit the floor with a dull meaty thud. Something from inside the wall went 'whoosh'.

Sacharissa felt something pass her ear before the world went black.

There were a lot of stars first, but only for a moment. Then there was just black.

*

Death surveyed the crowd from a position atop the assassin's guild building. "THIS LOOKS PROMISING," he told Binky. Binky snickered.

*

Teal'c croaked. He was not a happy frog. From his perch atop Detritus' hand, he looked down at what lay beneath him and decided in his little amphibian brain that down was a bad idea. Down meant dealing with all those feet at street level.

Detritus plowed on and Teal'c's options narrowed.


	12. Chapter 12

Detritus finally reached the stairs that lead up to the entrance of the Assassin's guild after pushing his way through a sea of Ankh Morpork's great unwashed. He climbed the steps and looked out over the sea of faces. Much ugliness stared back at him. By the time he made it as far as the top step he was coated with splattered fruit and he had been hit with everything from grapes to one pair of woman's bloomers. He took one look at the bloomers and saw the letters making up the word 'Delilah' stencilled on them. Why… why… why… Delilah? he wondered and scratched his head. He would probably need to place his head in a bucket of ice to work that one out. He tossed them aside.

The mood of the crowd was getting uglier by the minute. Detritus might be a troll but that didn't make him indestructible. There were dwarfs in that crowd and dwarfs were miners and miners were hard on rocks. Trolls were rocks that moved. Ergo he was under threat. Detrius was involved in some heavy thinking for a silicon-based intelligence living in a temperate climate. He was thankful for the fact that this time he had chosen to bring the piece-maker with him. Nothing gave a troll more self confidence than the feel of a weapon whose destructive potential was measured in megatons. 

The sight of Detritus standing on the steps caught the attention of the entire crowd. Conversations dropped from shouting level to hushed whispers. An air expectancy seemed to hover above the crowd. They waited. 

Anticipation became palpable.

They had seen this part before. They had enjoyed it before, but it was always good, and they waited with baited breath, enthralled and agog, especially so for the little quiver of expectation that only came with foreknowledge. It was great theatre.

In one hand Detritus held up a slim volume of words. In the other he waved the piece-maker. 

Every one knew about the piece-maker, or at least they knew someone who knew something about the piece-maker.

Detritus surveyed his audience.

The citizens of Ankh Morpork were almost uniformly aware of the destructive power of the device he held in his hand. It was nothing much more than a siege engine that had been modified by the addition of a handle and a winch so that it could be hefted like a conventional cross-bow, albeit on a much larger and more destructive scale. Detritus armed the beast with a bundle of cross-bow bolts, the population of which had more in common with a hay bale than a quiver. Rumour had it that the bundled bolts disintegrated into a fireball of biblical proportions before the tail of the bolts cleared the stressed timber spring. As usual reality was more awful than rumour. The few occasions when the thing had been used in anger, onlookers had seen a mushroom cloud rise above the area where the fireball landed. No witnesses to the immediate effect of the impact were ever found. There might not be any truth to the rumour that the fireball incinerated them. Charcoal piles make poor witnesses.

Detritus waved the piece-maker in the air.

The crowd fell silent, wondering what the next act of the day's street theatre might entail.

"Dis is the riot act," Detritus intoned. "It give me da power to…"

"Dat's not the riot act," suggested one brainless moron standing only a few metres in front of the giant troll.

Detritus blinked. He waited for the next neuron to fire. A glacier moved. We're talking about geological time scales here.

"OK," Detritus said finally. There was time for the villagers looking at the wall of ice approaching them to shift most of the village to a place with a less imposing view. "Dat's right. Dis is the riot act," Detritus said and then he waved the book in the air.

Sure enough, embossed on the cover in gold letters were the words 'Ankh Morpork city statutes, riot act of 1396'. Many members of the audience were impressed with Detritus' ability to recognise the book for what it was. That had a lot to do with the latest in air-cooled helmets that Detritus wore. 

"Dis," said Detritus, and waved the piece-maker. 'Is da reg – u – la - shons en – acted to en – force da riot act."

A few members of the audience translated Detritus' laborious pronunciation. Throughout the crowd, lips moved; accelerating the flow of syllables until they could be recognised for the fundamental truths that they were.

There was a concerted move away from the steps.

This was a kind of street theatre they had seen before as well. It came with Parental advisory warnings.

Given the pressure being exerted by the crowd pushing from behind (so they could see what was happening), and the perfectly understandable reluctance of the members of the crowd at the front to become part of what was happening, (because they could all see that the piece-maker was loaded and primed) there was a serious danger that someone might get hurt.

Detritus prepared for his next oratory gem.

The crowd waited.

So did Detritus.

*

Corporal Nobbs, Sergeant Colon and commander Vimes sheltered in the shade behind Detritus. It wasn't as safe as the doorway that Colon and Nobby occupied a few minutes earlier, but it was much better than standing in the crowd.

"I think we have their attention now Sergeant," Vimes told Detritus.

"Yeah but what do I do wid it now Sir?"

"Ah, now that is the question isn't it?"

The crowd was getting ugly again.

A lone tomato arced through the air.

*

O'Neill strolled through the crowd, making his way behind Carrot. Their passage was reasonably easy. Carrot mentioned people by name and they looked embarrassed and seemed to melt out of the way.

For all that, O'Neill was gradually becoming acutely aware of the growing resentment being shown by the people behind him. More and more of the mutterings they made seemed to be solidifying into something coherent and the content of that cohesion sent shivers up his spine. 

It went like this. The news article that prompted this gathering had gone on at great length about how the Assassins were wearing jungle camouflage colours. And there he was - O'Neill - pushing arrogantly through them, wearing just the sort of outfit that the news was saying the new assassins wore. 

The crowd might be composed of Ankh Morpork's finest street audience, but it was capable of making that connection without too much help.

O'Neill felt the hair at the nape of neck standing.

Just when he thought he might have to look for a place to hide, the crowd's attention was stolen by a scream of terror that issued from inside the Assassin's guild building.

It sounded nothing like either a cat or a pigeon, but it had much the same effect as mixing the two together.

A lone tomato passed overhead.

*

Otto awoke and found that he was sprawled on a hard stone floor. His preferred place to sleep was a coffin filled with dirt, so he drew the obvious conclusion that his sleep had been un-scheduled, and probably unfortunate. His head hurt and his mouth tasted as though he had partaken a meal of fur balls trimmed with dust bunnies. He wanted to cough them up but he couldn't put any momentum behind the expectoration. He just lay there and suffered for a bit.

He felt absolutely dreadful.

But as bad as that part of awakening might have been, there was one significantly worse aspect to this particular instance, one that he only became aware of when he opened his eyes. He was suddenly and unfairly confronted with the most alarming moral dilemma. Lying wantonly across his chest was the supine form of the delightful Sacharissa. Her skin was pale and fine. Her eye lashes were long and luxurious. Her lips were full and pouted. Her pulse beat steadily beneath the skin of her throat.

The smell of fresh blood filled his nostrils with a bouquet that was both rich and pure. 

The world may never know the effort that Otto expended while restraining himself at that moment. He trembled with the effort involved in stoically suppressing the impulse to sink his fangs into that alabaster neck, just above the place where her pulse beat so strongly under her skin, where…

That's enough of that, he chided himself, weakly. He groaned.

Despite the legendary vampire's strength Otto struggled with those trembling traitorous arms to push the young woman away. 

Her eyes fluttered, her lashes batted. She drew a deep breath and the mound of her ample bosom rose and fell, rose and fell… 

"Argh," Otto screamed and shoved her aside roughly. He scampered across the floor and over to the wall where he leant against the brickwork, and began singing a tea-totalling song.

Slowly but surely the temperance mantra had the effect it was intended to have upon him. The desire to rip Sacharissa's throat out and partake of her life's blood gradually faded. Gradually faded, gradually faded…

Sacharissa's eyes flew open. She rolled half upright to find Otto cowering with his back pressed firmly against the wall and his eyes shut tight. Her heart went out to him, knowing what he endured, but she didn't dare console him yet.

*

William De Worde watched the developing riot from a relatively safe vantage-point outside the crush of the crowd. His wheel like perch was perfectly placed and his pen was particularly poised. He just needed something to write.

An expectant hush had fallen over what had previously been a mildly angry mob in the aftermath of that blood-curdling scream. The intimidation that the crowd had experienced upon first sight of Detritus and the piece-maker had passed, evaporated by the heat of that scream.

They were waiting for the next act. 

This really was one of the better examples of Ankh Morpork street theatre and they were all fired up to enjoy it. Everyone was wondering what might happen next. Because this was entirely new territory.

"Get your sausages while they're hot," screamed a voice into the hush. "Just one dollar each, hot sausages in a bun, for one dollar."

All eyes turned toward C.M.O.T Dibbler and the various sausage carts. Trade picked up.

*

The only sound was the rat-a-tat of the Energiser Bunny beating his drum. 

Wherever goes man, there went rats. Wherever goes technological man there went the Energiser Bunny. It wove between the feet of Ankh Morpork's citizens with the sort of manic zeal that only and anthropomorphic toy powered by the world's longest lasting batteries could manage.

Somewhere overhead, the tomato reached the top of it's arc and began to lose altitude.

*

The scream had echoed into the night while Samantha Carter waited in the alleyway for the next disaster to befall the SG-1 team. This whole expedition had degenerated into the sort of farce that only the best of military campaigns could manage.

She had no idea where Jack, Daniel or Teal'c might be now. Knowing them they could be anywhere, doing anything. They might even be at the centre of the riot waiting to happen out there in the street for all she knew.

And here she was, stuck in an alley, guarding a pile of gear that looked like it came off the set of Xena Warrior Princess while outside in the street there was a riot in the making.

Time was passing.

The SGC was probably already assembling a taskforce to come through the gate and address whatever was here with military force and Carter had no idea what she was supposed to do about anything.

So she sat beside Angua's clothes and cradled the guns that she and Angua had collected from the watch house half an hour earlier. The safeties were all off. She eyed the entrance to the alleyway warily.

The hush of the crowd could only mean one thing, they were scared, and a scared crowd became a mob with so little effort. 

Carter frantically checked and rechecked the level of ammunition in each gun and debated how many of the crowd she could take with her if things got out of hand. She wasn't going down without a fight. That was a given.

She slung her ammo belts across each shoulder and strapped the additional holsters around her waist.

All that was needed to complete the picture was a ragged old bandanna. 

Nothing in Angua's clothes fit the bill.

She eyed the entrance to the alley warily and waited.

*

Binky wandered through the crowd virtually unimpeded by the sea of bodies. It wasn't as though they weren't in the same plane of existence, it was just that people seemed to melt out of the way of death and his horse. It was as though their eyes refused to see and their bodies refused to touch. Their faces assumed a curiously blank expression and their feet pedalled backward without referring back to the brain for instructions.

Death sat atop his horse and inspected the gathering. His empty eye-sockets landed on Jack O'Neill and lingered.

A few members of the mob had put two and two together and come up with four. For their next trick they put Jack O'Neill and his camouflage gear together with the blood-curdling scream and come up with another number entirely.

Death settled in to watch the fun. He had the best vantage point of anyone out there - high on his horse. Moonlight glinted n the blade of a scythe so sharp, the wind passing over it was cut in two.

*

"What was that?" Sacharissa asked suddenly. She looked up from her inspection of the letter opener on Leonard De Quirm's desk. She listened carefully. "Someone's coming," she hissed to Otto. 

Otto looked up from his carefully set up iconograph and waited for her to reach a conclusion.

"Quick hide," she added.

They looked around quickly and her eyes lighted on the curtains again. "Behind here," she instructed.

Otto looked longingly at his carefully arranged iconograph and debated. In the end he left it where it was, facing that giant stone ring, with the vertical pool surface inside it.

Sacharissa and Otto scurried behind the heavy curtains framing the office window and watched the entrance to De Quirm's study with calculated interest.

"Get the iconograph Otto," Sacharissa whispered. "I think we might need it."

*

Ridcully led his rag tag team of wizards through the Patrician's oblong office, heading for the once-it-was secret passageway. 

His team comprising the Lecturer in Recent Runes and the Bursar had been augmented by the inclusion of Pondor Stibbons, who had been waiting for them in the street outside the Patrician's Palace.

They made their ponderous way through the room, like a blimp procession with flowing ermine and velvet robes of brilliant colours and towering conical hats adorned with occult symbology. 

At the rear of the procession there was a shaggy threadbare sack of bones with far too much development in the arm department.

"Oook," it said. The unseen University Librarian was on the case. Under his arms there was arranged a pile of books, and with arms like that he could pile a lot of books.

"Yeah me too," commented the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

"Hee Hee," said the Bursar.

Mustrum Ridcully glanced at the Bursar and sighed. He wasn't carrying any dried frog pills and the Bursar was gone again.

"I always wanted to know what this place was like," The Lecturer in Recent Runes said affably. He turned one full circle in the middle of the room, not so much a pirouette as a ponder-ette. "Not half as ornate as I thought it would be. Quite austere as a matter of fact."

"This is not the time to sight see man," Ridcully advised. "Come on we have work to do."

Runes took a careful look at the chair that Lord Vetenary used when he sat at his desk. "Ha the seat of power," Runes said.

"Hee, hee," sniggered the Bursar.

Ridcully shook his head. Maybe things would have been better if he had recruited the Dean instead. At least he would make fewer bad puns. Although his usual chant of 'Yo!' could be just as infuriating when they were stalking the creatures from the dungeon dimensions.

"Oook," agreed the librarian. He knuckled along behind Ridcully. He seemed to be the only one of them who was taking the whole situation seriously. Ridcully was momentaily pleased to know that at least one other wizard regarded this assignment as important. He just wished it was a human wizard. It didn't do to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Ridcully stepped through the stone portal that Cheri Littlebottom had left open behind the Patrician's desk and led the rest of the wizards along the hallway to Leonard de Quirm's study.

They side stepped all of the weaponry on their way through.

The Librarian broke a morning-star free of it mechanism and dragged it long behind him. Books of spells were good, but when it came down to it, sometimes a piece of heavy metal with spikes on it was better.

Behind Leonard's curtains Otto and Sacharissa exchanged a questioning glance.

Ridcully and The Lecturer in recent Runes stepped into Leonard De Quirm's study. The Librarian and the Bursar followed a little way behind. 

Ponder Stibbons trailed through the door last of all, anxious to get on with things now that his back up had arrived. 

Ridcully's entry was typical of the man's style. The door thundered out if its niche in the doorframe and he stepped through. The others slipped through the doorway in his wake. The door flew back after hitting the wall thunderously and cannoned into Ponder with a force of similar magnitude to what would be measured if Detritus had unleashed his massive fist. The sudden blow caught Ponder in the shoulder and he fell into the table beneath which he had played tag with the frog. He tumbled backward over the table, scattering paper in every direction. He wasn't finished. He did an inelegant backward summersault and landed with a thump on the floor. To add the necessary insult to injury, a bookcase full of diaries and bound notes fell onto the table and buried Ponder in paper.

"That's it," Ridcully said. He pointed needlessly across the room at the giant stone portal that filled the far corner.

"Wow," said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, always one to capture the moment in poetry. 'Cool."

"Oook," said the Librarian. 

The combined might of the three wizards was marshalled when they raised their staves at the stargate. Thaumalogical pressure built behind them.

*

The lone tomato was nearing the end of it's flight.


	13. Chapter 13: The thing is finally finishe...

Carrot climbed to the top of the stairs and stood beside Detritus. "I'll take over from here Sergeant," Carrot hissed in an aside. 

Detritus stepped back, looking relieved.

Carrot waved to the crowd. "Stop that this instant," he chided them like they were a gang of rowdy school children and he was the Principal. The crowd dropped back slightly. Watching Carrot in action was a favourite pastime in Ankh Morpork. Strange improbable things happened around Carrot, strange entertaining and often confusing things.

"Now is this any way to behave?" he asked the crowd. The question was only partially rhetorical.

Several people in the front row murmured. "No."

"You there Mr Ballantyne and you there Mr Ironbark. I would have expected better of such upright citizens as your selves." Ironbarks nickname was Ironbar for good reason. The scared and battered bouncer looked abashed under the 2000W glare of Carrots attention.

The crowd was rapt.

"Is this for real?" O'Neill asked Vimes. O'Neill watched the sudden change in the crowd with disbelief.

"Oh yes," Vimes said sardonically.

"It can't last."

"It's worked in this town for years now."

O'Neill shook his head. "He could be king."

"We've already dealt with that."

In front of them Carrot has still berating the crowd. "Now is this the way Ankh Morpork treats guests in this city?" Carrot continued. Under normal circumstances Ankh Morpork was more interested in taking the contents of a visitor's purse and putting it in their own, through one method or another.

While the crowd debated with it self what to say in answer to Carrot's conundrum, Carrot turned to his fellow Watchmen.

"Detritus," Carrot hissed. "Hold them back while I find out what that scream was about." He turned back to the crowd and raised his voice. "Now I'm going in to speak with the assassins and I'm going to find out what's been going on and I want all of you to go home," Carrot called out to the crowd. "And remember each and every one of you, I know where that home is."

Several thousand people tasted the tone of that statement and didn't like the personal flavour.

Carrot slipped past the anxious Assassin's Guild guards that stood behind the watchmen hiding in the shadows around the doorway. Their eyes tracked the crowd, waiting for someone to launch the first projectile, the one that would start the avalanche of disaster.

*

William De Worde wiped at the tomato stain that now covering his shirt and wondered what it was that he had been about to write. The idea was there one minute and now it was gone. He cursed.

*

Lord Downey looked down at the slavering jaws that had just suddenly been clamped around his wrist. There was no sign of blood yet but the message came through that there could be. Blood was an option. A silver knife would be the answer, but that was secreted in a pocket that could only be reached by the hand with the teeth marks in the wrist. 

Standing by every window in the room and in every other room on the upper floors of the Guild building was an armed man. Each assassin was pointing a weapon at the crowd below. 

"Ah," said Lord Downey.

The mouth around his wrist didn't so much growl, as vibrate his arm so he got the impression of GROWL through his bones.

Before Lord Downey's unfortunate encounter with lassie's evil twin, a great deal of planning had taken place within his office. The conclusion had been reached that a few key people would be the best ones to shoot so that the ensuing panic would dissipate the crowd. Lord Downey had been about to deliver the order when he felt the arrival of something muscular, furry and ferocious - and then came the clamp his wrist. A wet tongue caressed his flesh and he shuddered.

His eyes left the sight of his tortured wrist behind so he could take a closer look at the exquisitely groomed wolfhound teasing the tendons of his wrist with her teeth.

She growled aloud to emphasise the point, but that was just overkill. The point had already been made.

"I have a silver knife," whispered Mansell-Smith.

"Ah but how fast can you deploy it?" Downey observed.

*

The arch chancellor of the unseen university made an imposing figure, with his arm raise and his face glowing with the evangalistic zeal of someone gong about Good Work. Behind him stood a stalwart team of wizards. The Lecturer in Recent Runes wore a similar expression, and held a similar stance. Both had staves raised and words on their lips. Even the Bursar was joining in the incantation. Behind them again, the Librarian was thumbing his way through a book, his fingers were frantic trying to keep up with the way his eyes were reading ahead. 

"Oook," said the Librarian.

The wizards chanted in unison. Eldritch forces gathered.

Almost as though powered by the wizards spell, the surface of the event horizon began to pulsate in preparation for action of it's own.

"Nooooooooo!" screamed Ponder Stibbons from his position pinned beneath the bookcase.

The event horizon burst forth, like someone had bomb-dived into the pool that it appeared to be. Like a watery cloud, the distended event horizon swirled malignantly into the room and then retreated as suddenly as it had appeared.

Had there been a thaumatological barometer in the room, it would have gone beresk. The pressure within the room built to explosive proportions.

"Oook?" asked the Librarian and then he peered beneath the overturned bookcase, at the place where Ponder Stibbons was pinned.

*

Carrot slipped past the position where Gaspode the wonder dog was wondering what he might get for supper. Progress had been halting.

Ignoring the potential health risks, Carrot patted Gaspode on the head in passing and the he was inside.

"Nice doggy," Gaspode muttered in the manner of Scrooge delivering a 'Bah humbug.'

Gaspode watched Carrot's progress through the hallway until the door swung shut blocking his line of sight. He sighed a doggy sigh and placed his muzzle back on he forepaws.

Carrot slipped up the stairs and made his way to the familiar office at the top of the building.

No one showed any interest in impeding his progress. He burst through the door unannounced.

"Ah, Angua, there you are," said Carrot affably. "We were all wondering where you had gone." He bent down and patted her head. Lord Downey winced with each pat. "And Lord Downey, and Mr Silversmith, that is a big crossbow you're waving there. You should be careful otherwise someone might get hurt."

Downey watched it happen. He was just one man, albeit armed with a sword, but that was still in it's scabbard, and he was standing in a room full of men armed with loaded and cocked crossbows, but the fact of the matter was; the men with the crossbows were the ones who were outnumbered.

"I was just telling him that he shouldn't wave that thing around," Downey agreed.

"Very wise," agreed Carrot. He looked down at Angua. "I think it's safe to release him," he told her. She was slow to react, but eventually did as Carrot suggested. She disappeared at a brisk canter.

Rumour was a wonderful thing and right at the moment Lord Downey recalled the rumour that the king of Ankh Morpork walked the streets in the humble guise of a Watchman.

Lord Downey listened to the clatter of falling cross bows and shook his head, carefully. After all, his wrist remained imprisoned between the teeth of a wolf-hound.

One cross bow exploded into action. The bolt rocketed out of the window and arced over the city. It's motion was bathed in the new moonlight.

*

It was an amazing sight, one to put the fear of god (any and all of the denizens of Dunmanifestin) into just about anybody.

"What, may I ask, is going on here?" demanded the Patrician, Lord Havelock Vetenari of Ankh Morpork. He stepped through the shimmering interface in space time that cloaked the maw of the stargate and looked disdainfully down at the array of wizards that confronted him. 

Leonard De Quirm of the discworld and General Hammond of the Stargate command accompanied the Patrician's return to the discworld. De Quirm was appalled at the stated of his study. Leave the place for a quick jaunt around the universe and look what people do.

Hammond was just appalled.

The bolt of thaumalogical proportions that had been building inexorably could be restrained no more. It erupted from the staffs of three wizards.

"Ooook!" bellowed the Librarian.

A flash of octarine fire filled the room. 

From behind the curtains a flash of excited salamander light erupted immediately afterward.

Ponder Stibbons gave up the struggle to climb out from beneath the book case and its contents, and began searching frantically for something even more solid to hide under.

*

Angua reappeared in the room full of disarmed assassins. All eyes tracked her progress. She had been sleek as a hound, but she was sleeker as a human. And she was wrapped in a thoroughly inadequate bath towel. Her hands fought an unequal battle. The kept trying to pull it up and down at the same time. With all that movement she only managed to induce a kind of visual distraction that forced the eyes of on-lookers to always be looking at the wrong end of the towel if they were trying to catch sight of the particular part of her anatomy she was struggling to hide. 

Even with all that fuss the towel provided just marginally more covering than she would have managed with her hands and forearms alone, and required a good deal more work on her part. She looked around for something more substantial to wear and found nothing immediately obvious.

"Carrot," she said in exasperation. "Can we get out of here now?"

"Certainly," he said. "I suspect our business here with Lord Downey is complete."

Lord Downey was unsure whether to shake his head or nod it. He compromised with a dazed circular orbit instead.

"Thank you," Angua said with heavy irony.

She was very aware of the attention she was getting from the assassins, all of whom were the younger sons of wealthy families and consequently were all used to getting their own way, often with the servant girls. Angua didn't want to be forced into a position where she had to get nasty to keep them at bay.

Carrot and Angua galloped down the stairs. They reached the entry hall. Carrot set off in the direction of the front door. Last time either of them had checked, there was a huge angry mob was on the other side of that door. 

Werewolves knew about mobs, often it was the last thing they ever knew. "Hey," Angua called.

Carrot skidded to a halt. He looked a question at her.

"I'm not going out there dressed like this," she explained.

"Oh, of course," Carrot said and searched frantically around for something else for her to wear.

"I'll meet you at the watch house," she said. "I'll slip out the back way."

"Well," he said dubiously. "If that's alright."

"I promise not to hurt anyone."

Out of sight of any human eyes she discarded the towel because it was too restricting in her flight. 

A giant wolfhound slipped out the back door. 

Gaspode was gnawing on a bone that he had found beside a pile of trash. It was only by watching to see which pile moved that Angua was able to tell Gaspode form the garbage. His head came up for a moment. He watched while Angua ran down the alleyway. His expression was the doggy version of the kind that sold thousands of movie tickets to teenaged girls.

Once again out of sight of any prying human eyes Angua resumed her human form. Naked rather than nude, she padded to a halt not far from where her clothes had been. There was no sign of them. 

There was no sign of Samantha Carter either.

She stood with her hands on her hips and looked around. "Damn," cursed Angua.

*

Sacharissa and Otto crouched behind the curtains and watched the fun with wizards and stray newcomers. 

The iconograph had blazed forth with the light of a dozen excited salamanders. 

Inside the dark confines of the iconograp box, the imps furiously painted the images that they saw onto the plates, each of them frantically splashing acid like there was no tomorrow. There was one for red, one for blue and one for yellow.

Otto hid behind the curtain and he was bathed in the light of a dozen salamanders. He screamed, but remained integrated this time. No one heard his scream amid the noise and confusion that reined in Leonard De Quirm's study.

"Well done Otto," Sacharissa said.

"Thank you," he said, "but it does hurt so."

A wooden crossbow bolt burst through the window that had been hidden by the curtains and it landed squarely in Otto's chest. 

"Ooooohh…" He hissed and then he burst into a fluttering of fine ash and wafted to the floor.

"Oh –ing hell," Sacharissa remarked. "Not again!"

*

Mustrum Ridcully and the Lecturer in recent Runes peered up at the colossal hole that had suddenly appeared in the roof. It was where the blast that had destroyed much of Leonard De Quirms study had vented.

"You put me off my aim," Ridcully accused the Librarian.

"Oook," the Librarian chided.

"Yes I can see that now. Of course I couldn't before. That might have been dangerous, man. You should speak first before doing something like that."

"Oook."

"Well there is that too of course."

"Oook," agreed the Librarian.

"Bursar," Ridcully called. There was no answer. "Where is the man? You can never trust him to be where you expect him to be." 

A pile of books and soot moved ponderously. Ponder Stibbons crawled from beneath them. He coughed once or twice then he turned toward the sound of a pitiful moan that issued from somewhere beside him. 

He crouched back down and helped the partially comatose form of the University Bursar to clamber from beneath a pile of masonry. 

Samantha Carter burst through the door and confronted a scene from Armageddon. Each hand was filled to overflowing with gun, and ammo was hanging off her in every direction. "Oh my god!" she screamed. "I'm too late."

The place looked like the marines had been in and partied.

*

Angua stood in the alley, with her hands on her hips and glared around, trying to find a clue to where her clothes might have gone. In that pose and that lack of outfit she looked like the reincarnation of some sort of ancient Amazonian warrior. As far as she was concerned now, she was neither naked nor nude, she was just angry as hell.

"Buggerit," muttered Foul Old Ron. He saw naked young women walking about in Ankh Morpork's alleyways all the time. Not often in the flesh, so to speak, but he was not really in a position to make the distinction. His mind had passed that point a long time ago.

"Couldn't have said it better myself," Angua said in disgust. She turned on her heel and faced whomever it was that had just passed such a succinct judgement on her circumstances, determined to find out what had gone on.

Foul Old Ron clutched her breastplate in one hand and her skirt in the other, effectively making them totally unsuitable to be worn by a person ever again. 

"Millennium hand and shrimp," he said. Even his alcohol-abused brain sensed that he was in some sort of danger. He took one involuntary step backward. That felt so good that he took a couple more.

Pawning the outfit should garner him enough money to buy at least one boot and a bottle of cheap wine, provided he stayed alive long enough to spend it.

Angua toyed with the idea of tearing his throat out, but it wasn't worth the days she would have to spend in a sick bed afterward.

She turned dismissively on her heel again. The sound of flexing meat filled the alleyway. A wolfhound marched out into the street.

Foul Old Ron shuffled with exaggerated purpose in the opposite direction. He burst out from the other end of the alley and continued his haphazard motion for hours before exhaustion got the better of him. Gaspode his thinking brain dog had to seriously hustle to keep up.

*

She had worked out what had actually gone on eventually.

"How are we supposed to get home now?" Samantha Carter demanded. She waved a gonne at the wizards. Ridcully refused to be cowered.

"Another of the dungeon dimension denizens?" the Lecturer in Recent Runes asked Ridcully. He took his lead from the Arch Chancellor and stood his ground. He had no idea what that thing was that the fetching young woman was waving at him, but she seemed pretty confident of the outcome of their confrontation and he had no intention of testing the justification behind her confidence just yet.

"I expect so," Ridcully said confidently. "I say young lady, would you mind lifting your shirt?"

"Yes please do," said the Lecturer in recent Runes completely missing the point of the request.

Samantha's response was purely non-verbal.

"Dr Carter," said General Hammond. "I think things are much less severe than they look"

"Oh," she said. "Then that blast wasn't aimed at the stargate?"

"Ah," General Hammond said and turned around to survey the damage. "I see. Yes I understand your concern. Would you mind having a look for me?"

*

Carrot and Detritus stood on the step outside the Assassin's guild. 'No," Carrot called. "I have no intention of allowing you people to take the law into your own hands. Now I'm sure we can all be reasonable people. Why don't you all go home and let the Watch look after watch business." He spotted a figure sitting a little way apart from the main mob. He was batting at a red stain on his shirt. "I'm sure you'll all be able to read about it in tomorrow's Times."

For most people that sort of statement would have been palpably ridiculous, and would have been sufficient grounds for only the faintest hesitation before mob rule, ruled.

Not when Carrot Ironfounderson uttered something so trite.

The crowd murmured and looked embarrassed. A few of them clasped their hands behind the their backs, eyes downcast and stirred the dirt with their toes.

O'Neill watched in amazement. It was going to work, he realised. The extremities of the crowd were already dissolving like a sugar cube in hot water as people realised that the show was over and hanging around might actually have consequences.

Something happened on Detritus' hand.

"Daniel Jackson," Teal'c asked in the short silence that had settled over the SG-1 team. His voice carried a clearly puzzled note. "Where am I? And what is going on?"

"I have no idea," Daniel answered absently. "It has all been way to complicated for me."

"Me neither," O'Neill said. "Just shut up and maybe it'll keep happening."

"Oh."

O'Neill stared across the crowd for a moment. "Umm," he said after a delay that dragged out to become a few seconds. "Teal'c, where have you been?"

"Been?"

"You know, after you got shot by the Gou'ld?"

"All I remember is an overwhelming urge to eat flies."

"OK," O'Neill said. "I think I'll deal with that later."

*

A few last flakes of plaster dropped from the ceiling. One of them landed softly on the top of General Hammond's cap.

"These men have blown up the stargate," shouted Samantha Carter.

"Would if that were true," muttered Lord Vetenary. He looked at the wizards, then at the hole in the study roof, then at the fractal scattering of plaster, that no longer rendered the ceiling, and the paper that had been neatly arranged on the desk lay everywhere. So much change in so little time… "Don't let me keep you, Arch Chancellor."

"Um yes we have things that need to be attended to," Ridcully agreed. He wasn't sure what had happened but, whatever it was, it was not a good idea to hang around and ask for explanations.

"I say," said Ponder. "Perhaps an explanation might be mgbble mgbble." With Ridcully's hand clamped around his mouth he trailed off after the others.

The wizards swept from the room with a lame attempt at dignity. Under the circumstances that was impossible, carrying several kilograms of atomised plaster on their robes, they managed little better than the appearance of a rout.

They brushed past Sacharissa and the pile of ash that had been Otto as though they weren't there.

Sacharissa picked at the scab on the back of her head and placed a drop of her blood in the pile of ash. Otto reappeared, bounced a few times to savour being un-dead yet again.

"Oook," said the Librarian.

"Why thank you," Sacharissa said. She blushed. Otto groaned at the sight. Not again…

*

It was only an hour or two later that the SG-1 team gathered in the debriefing room of the SGC and scattered themselves around the conference table.

A computerised display of the stargate map filled the wall at one end of the room.

"We have an agreement from Lord Vetenary," General Hammond began, "to keep his end of the stargate sealed. I, for one, trust the man completely in this regard. I don't think it will be in any one's best interest if we keep that transport route open. Do we all agree on that?"

O'Neill nodded.

"Yes sir," chorused Samantha Carter and Daniel Jackson.

"I still don't know what happened," commented Teal'c.

"I'm not sure any of us could tell you," O'Neill said.

"I'm not sure I believe it myself," Jackson said.

*

Lord Vetenary placed the copy of the Ankh Morpork Times back on the desk and looked out through the window of his office to the city outside.

A poor quality image showing the destruction in Leonard De Quirm's study filled almost a quarter of the front page of the paper. The headline read 'Boffin's Base Blasted'. 

The outline of the stargate was not clearly visible in the iconograph image, it had been obscured by the octarine flash of the wizards' staves, reflecting back at the iconograph off all the falling dust. 

The stargate had proved indestructible, even deflecting the combined might of the three wizards in concert. That sort of power was not for the discworld. Not now, and probably not ever, unless human nature changed.

Somehow Lord Vetenary could not see that happening in the foreseeable future.

A side bar on the newspaper carried the story of the riot that had threatened to erupt outside the Assassin's Guild. There was no suggestion that the two events were related.

Lord Vetenary glanced over toward the Assassin's Guild building. There it stood, none the worse for last night's activities. 

Life went on. He went back to his desk and prepared to meet the leading citizens of Uberwald. They were due to arrive in a few hours and there was so much to do.

*

Death plucked the remains of the Energiser Bunny from off the ground and looked closely at the batteries in its back. He plucked them out and watched while they faded into wherever it was that the life of an Energiser Bunny went when the body finally passed away.

"THESE THINGS SEEM TO GET INTO AS MANY PLACES AS WE DO," he commented to Binky. "YOU DON"T SUPPOSE WE CAUSED THEM DO YOU?"

"SQEEK," said the death of rats.

"YOU"RE PROBABLY RIGHT," death said and then they rode off.


End file.
